The Marriage Podcast for Smart People: Recent Episodes
Caleb & Verlynda Simonyi-Gindele
d want in real life is so common, why the shame compounds, and how the drift can be reversed at the right level of intervention. Free consultation: https://therapevo.com/porn-addiction/?utm_source=podcast
s protection, and walks through five somatic pacing tools for staying present on your own timeline, plus a direct word for the partner who betrayed. Support from a betrayal trauma specialist: https://therapevo.com/healing-for-the-betrayed/?utm_source=podcast
s progress, the researched reason broken streaks trigger binges, and the three moves that turn a relapse into fuel for more resilient sobriety. https://therapevo.com/porn-addiction/?utm_source=podcast
t really doing the recovery work. This episode is a discernment framework for the betrayed partner: how to tell real recovery from performed recovery on a calendar, what the research says about kids and high-conflict homes, and how to build the power to choose when finances keep you stuck. Get support at https://therapevo.com/healing-for-the-betrayed/?utm_source=podcast
ll know exactly what to do the next time a wave hits. https://therapevo.com/porn-addiction/?utm_source=podcast
ll stay or go, this episode is the permission you may not know you need. Caleb and Verlynda explain why a decision made in the first raw weeks is unreliable, what a structured pause actually looks like, and the full range of options that live between staying exactly as you were and ending it today. This is not a push to stay or to leave, but a way to protect your right to choose well. Learn more at https://therapevo.com/infidelity-recovery-for-couples/?utm_source=podcast
If you have ever wondered why one specific kind of porn pulls you in when you scroll past everything else, this episode is for you. Caleb and Verlynda unpack the idea of your arousal template, why porn so often becomes a way to medicate an old wound rather than a simple matter of sex drive, and why understanding the why does more than white-knuckling ever will. There is also a direct, compassionate word for betrayed partners. Whether you are a man or a woman, this one is worth your time. https://therapevo.com/porn-addiction/?utm_source=podcast
If you discovered a betrayal and found yourself wanting your partner more instead of less, this episode is for you. We unpack what hysterical bonding is, why your nervous system reaches for the very person who hurt you, and the crash in desire that often follows months later, so you can stop treating your own response as the problem. Start here for support: https://therapevo.com/healing-for-the-betrayed/?utm_source=podcast
s doing. Caleb and Verlynda walk through what reality rupture is, why every past memory is suddenly suspect, and four practical conditions that help your nervous system reorient against the truth. https://therapevo.com/healing-for-the-betrayed/?utm_source=podcast
s behavior, and the two reasons most partners get stuck at this phase, which is almost always both at once. Practical, clinically grounded, and the conversation almost nobody else is having. https://therapevo.com/contact-us/?utm_source=podcast
t reaching your partner. In this episode, we walk through restitution after betrayal: the named clinical work that creates the conditions for repair, structured around three components and an honest look at the multi-year arc. For the partner who caused the harm and wants to do the work seriously, the prescription is here. https://therapevo.com/help-for-the-betrayer/?utm_source=podcast
s actually happening in your brain, what the flatline is, and the recovery pathway most men in the abstinence-only forums never hear about. https://therapevo.com/contact-us/?utm_source=podcast
s recovery, the language of healing can start to sound like a weapon. He says he is dysregulated. He talks about boundaries. And every conversation about what he did ends with you being the one who needs to do more work. In this episode, we walk through the five most common patterns of weaponized therapy speak, why DARVO with a clinical vocabulary is harder to name than ordinary gaslighting, and what to actually do when you hear it. https://therapevo.com/healing-for-the-betrayed/?utm_source=podcast
If you have promised yourself again and again that this would be the last time and ended up back in the same place, this episode is for you. Caleb walks through why hating your porn use is not the same as being able to stop, why self-disgust often fuels the cycle rather than interrupting it, and what actually starts to make the loop lose its grip. For more on this and to book a free 20-minute consult, visit https://therapevo.com/porn-addiction/?utm_source=podcast.
s actually going on. Caleb and Verlynda walk through the empathic stress paradox, the three shame patterns that re-injure your partner during active recovery, and why individual therapy on shame is often the missing piece. https://therapevo.com/help-for-the-betrayer/?utm_source=podcast
t bring the calm it seems like it should, and what complete honesty actually means in this season. https://therapevo.com/healing-for-the-betrayed/?utm_source=podcast
t a venting subscription about your spouse, and what happens when your spouse finally walks in. Learn more at https://therapevo.com/couples-counseling/?utm_source=podcast
t feel like you, this episode is for you. Verlynda walks you through the three nervous system states polyvagal theory names, why talk alone plateaus, and three specific resets you can use the next time a trigger hits. Learn more at https://therapevo.com/healing-for-the-betrayed/?utm_source=podcast.
You installed Covenant Eyes because you wanted out. For a few weeks, maybe a few months, the screenshots and the reports made it feel like something was finally changing. The frequency dropped. The late-night slide into the phone got harder. And then something odd happened. The behavior slowed, but the pull didn’t. The fantasy kept running. The ogling kept happening. You started wondering, quietly at first, is Covenant Eyes enough for porn addiction, or is there something it was never going to touch?
https://youtu.be/BRX1DdvO9xk
If you’re asking that question, I want to say something up front. Covenant Eyes is not the problem. In my clinical work with men and women caught in pornography addiction, I’ve seen accountability software do real, legitimate work. It creates friction. It interrupts the automatic pattern. It gives you a moment of pause before the next click. And in the earliest, most volatile stage of trying to stop, that pause has protected marriages, jobs, and faith lives.
But the question you’re sitting with is the right one. The software is a fence. A good fence. It is not, by itself, recovery. And if the fence has been up for a year or three and the addiction is still running on the inside of your head, you are not doing Covenant Eyes wrong. You are running into the one thing a fence cannot do.
What Covenant Eyes Actually Does WellBefore I name the limits, I want to honor what the tool is for. Covenant Eyes and similar products (Accountable2You, Ever Accountable, Canopy, Bark, and others) were built around a legitimate insight: the internet made pornography private, instant, and always available, which stripped away a lot of the old friction that used to slow people down.
So the tool reintroduces friction. It puts eyes on the screen. It notifies someone you’ve asked to walk with you. When someone is not fully committed to stopping yet, the visibility alone can still change behavior. For people already in recovery, it removes the easy slip at 1 a.m. when willpower is always weakest. For parents, it does legitimate work keeping early exposure out of a ten-year-old’s phone.
None of that is small. I routinely encourage clients to keep accountability software installed through the full length of their recovery work. I do not think of it as a temporary measure you graduate from. I think of it as a fence that stays on the property. The question is never whether to have the fence. The question is what to do about why you keep walking up to it.
The Pattern I See in SessionMany clients who sit down in my office with Covenant Eyes already running on their phone have some version of the same story. The software is working. The behavior has slowed. Real white-knuckle sobriety is happening, sometimes for months. And yet they are not better. They are often worse.
This is where accountability software alone stops being enough for porn addiction, and where the real clinical work begins. If you recognize yourself in any of what follows, you are not failing at Covenant Eyes. You are running into its natural limits.
The behavior stops but the fantasy doesn’tThis is the most common one. The blocker catches the websites. It cannot stop the scenes already stored in your mind. Clients describe replaying pornography they watched years ago. They describe noticing someone at the grocery store and running a scene in their head on the drive home. The tool stopped the screen. The regulation strategy moved inside the skull, where no software will ever reach.
You are finding workarounds, or thinking about themMany clients I sit with tell me they either find a way around the blocker or spend a lot of energy thinking about how to. A second device. An incognito window on a friend’s laptop. A business trip. A forgotten tablet in a drawer. This is not because the person is uniquely dishonest. It is because the underlying drive has not been addressed, so the nervous system keeps sending the signal, and the signal eventually finds a route.
The accountability report has become routineThe report still goes out. The partner or friend still sees it. The conversations, if they are happening, have become mechanical. Both people are going through the motions of accountability while the actual problem goes unaddressed. The fence is up. Nobody is talking about why the climber keeps coming back.
The shame is worse than it used to beThis one is counterintuitive. Over months and years, the shame can quietly intensify rather than relax. Because the behavior slowed but the interior state didn’t change, you now have proof, every week, that the thing inside you is still there. The report is no longer reassuring. It has become a scoreboard for a game you aren’t actually winning.
Each of these is a sign, not of tool failure, but of something the tool was never designed to treat.
What Porn Has Been Regulating All AlongHere is the clinical truth almost no porn recovery product wants to say out loud: pornography use, for most people who come to me, is not fundamentally about sex. It is about regulation.
Pornography is one of the most efficient nervous-system regulators available. It provides a quick dopamine shift, a shutdown of anxious activation, a brief experience of control when life feels out of control, and a counterfeit sense of connection when attachment is scarce. The brain was not designed to find that cocktail in a phone. When it does, it learns that pathway quickly, and it returns to it under specific conditions: loneliness, stress, shame, conflict, rejection, boredom, unresolved pain.
Our clinical experience backs this up. A 2024 study in Archives of Sexual Behavior of over 1,000 adults found that attachment insecurity, both anxious and avoidant, predicts compulsive sexual behavior and problematic pornography use, and that emotion regulation difficulties mediate that relationship. In plain English: if a person struggles to feel safely connected, and if they lack the internal tools to regulate hard emotions, pornography becomes an increasingly strong pull. The porn use is downstream. The attachment and regulation deficits are upstream.
We see the same pattern in other data. A 2022 study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine identified difficulties in emotion regulation and loneliness as the strongest independent predictors of problematic pornography use. Not moral failure. Not a willpower defect. A specific, describable clinical pattern that treatment can actually address.
Researcher Jay Stringer, studying nearly 4,000 people with unwanted sexual behavior, concluded that the behavior is never random. It is always pointing, like a signpost, toward something underneath: early attachment wounds, unmet needs for validation, unresolved trauma, sustained loneliness, chronic self-contempt.
Now ask yourself what a blocker can do with any of that. It can stop the screen. It cannot repair an attachment rupture. It cannot metabolize a childhood wound. It cannot teach a nervous system to regulate something other than a dopamine hit. It was never supposed to.
Why Accountability Without Interior Work Can Amplify the Shame CycleI want to name one more dynamic carefully, because it is often misunderstood. Surveillance without clinical work can quietly turn up the shame dial over time. In a violent or coercive relationship, we would say something entirely different about monitoring. We are speaking here about a marriage or a friendship where safety is not the issue, and both people are trying, in good faith, to help.
Here is the mechanism. Accountability software is built to make behavior visible. When the interior driver of that behavior is attachment rupture, trauma, or shame itself, making the behavior more visible without addressing the driver can create a feedback loop. The person sees, every week, a report of what their interior life just did. If the interior life has not changed, the report becomes proof that they are what they fear they are.
A 2018 meta-analysis in Archives of Sexual Behavior found that moral incongruence, the distress of believing one thing and behaving another way, is one of the strongest predictors of self-perceived pornography addiction and the shame that attaches to it. More recent research links this shame spiral to worse outcomes, including depression, suicidal ideation, and increased likelihood of the relationship ending over the porn use itself.
This does not mean Covenant Eyes is dangerous. It means visibility exposes whatever is underneath, and without care, that exposure can turn into shame. Shame is one of the most reliable fuels for the next relapse. You did not install Covenant Eyes to build a shame generator. If it has become one, the tool is not broken. The tool is missing its partner.
How to Use the Fence the Way It Was Meant to Be UsedLet me give you the frame I use with clients, because it changes how the tool works inside the therapy.
Covenant Eyes is a fence. It is a good fence. Its job is not to make you holy. Its job is to slow you down long enough to ask a specific question when you feel the pull: why am I trying to climb over this right now? Not: why did I fail. Not: how do I hide better. Just: what am I actually reaching for, underneath the behavior, in this specific moment?
If you are pulled toward the fence after a fight with your spouse, the answer might be about attachment threat. If it’s after a shame spike at work, it’s probably about self-worth and regulation. If it’s after a long stretch of loneliness, the driver is right there in the name. The fence doesn’t answer the question for you. It just buys you three seconds, a minute sometimes, to ask it. That pause is the tool’s real gift. Everything else follows from whether you use that gift.
Almost every client I have seen move from managing the behavior to genuinely recovering does two things at once. They keep Covenant Eyes on. And they do the interior work that lets the pause become meaningful.
What Covenant Eyes Plus Recovery Actually Looks LikeHere is what the “plus” side actually looks like.
Trauma-informed porn recovery therapy. Specifically, clinical work that can identify and treat the attachment patterns, early wounds, and nervous-system regulation deficits that are driving the behavior. In our practice this often means a combination of approaches rooted in attachment theory, body-based work that helps calm the nervous system, and for many clients, trauma therapies like EMDR or Internal Family Systems (IFS, which works with the different “parts” of a person that carry shame, protection, or pain). This is what actually changes what your brain is reaching for. Our porn addiction counseling page describes what that process looks like with us.
Attachment repair with a partner, where one exists. Porn addiction almost always coexists with attachment rupture. The partner who has been watching the reports is often carrying betrayal trauma, whether that word has been said out loud or not. Couples work runs in parallel with the individual recovery, not instead of it. Women, by the way, struggle with pornography too, and betrayed partners come in every gender configuration. None of what I am writing here is specific to any one marriage shape.
Community, as adjunct. Twelve-step groups like SAA, and for partners COSA or S-Anon, are real supports alongside clinical work. They are not a substitute for the therapy part, but they provide something therapy cannot: ongoing, frequent, peer-level community with people walking the same road.
A realistic timeline. Recovery usually takes longer than people hope at first. We wrote a full piece on how long it takes to recover from pornography addiction if you want the fuller picture. What I will say here is that the timeline is not about counting days without porn. It is about the slow repair of the interior systems that were using porn in the first place.
Awareness of the shame cycle. The shame-relapse loop is one of the most stubborn features of porn addiction, and it has its own dynamic worth understanding. If anything I have written above about shame amplification resonated, our article on the porn addiction, brain, shame, and relapse cycle goes deeper on what that loop is doing in the brain and how therapy addresses it.
Keep the fence. Build the inside. That is the shape of actual recovery.
The Part I Want You to HearCovenant Eyes is an ally. It really is. What I hope you hear me saying is not that you have been doing recovery wrong, or that a tool you trusted has been the problem all along. The tool is doing the job it was designed for.
The job it was not designed for is the one you came here asking about. Whether porn will finally stop being the thing your brain reaches for when something hurts, or feels lonely, or runs out of other ways to soften. That job is slow, relational, and human. It is what therapy, community, and honest work with a partner do. It is absolutely possible. It is not what software does.
If you have been faithfully running accountability software for a year or two or five, and the behavior has shifted but the pull has not, you have not been failing. You have been carrying more of the load than one tool was ever meant to carry. You can keep the fence, and you can invite in the help that does what the fence cannot.
Frequently Asked QuestionsIs Covenant Eyes enough to stop porn addiction on its own?For most people struggling with compulsive pornography use, accountability software alone is not enough for lasting recovery. It effectively interrupts behavior, especially early on, but it cannot treat the attachment patterns, trauma responses, and emotion regulation deficits that typically drive ongoing use. Long-term recovery usually requires pairing the tool with trauma-informed therapy, attachment repair, and community support.
Should my partner be my accountability person and receive the Covenant Eyes reports?We generally recommend against this arrangement, even when both partners are willing. The partner of someone struggling with pornography use is almost always carrying their own betrayal trauma, and placing them in the monitor role tends to intensify their hypervigilance and tether their nervous system to the weekly reports instead of their own healing. A better structure is to have reports go to a recovery-aligned friend, pastor, mentor, sponsor, or same-gender accountability group member, while your partner is supported in their own betrayal trauma healing. Transparency with a partner remains essential. Monitoring by a partner is a different thing, and it tends to cost more than it gives.
What should I add to Covenant Eyes if I am still relapsing?The most common missing pieces are clinical work that addresses the underlying drivers (trauma-informed therapy with a CSAT-trained or otherwise addiction-informed clinician), partner or couples work where relevant, and sustained community in a recovery group. If the fantasy and ogling are continuing even when the behavior has slowed, that is a strong signal that the regulation function of the behavior has not yet been addressed, which is specifically what therapy treats.
What if the behavior has stopped but the fantasy has not?This is one of the most common patterns we see, and it is not a sign that you are failing. It is a sign that the underlying regulation pattern is still active, and the brain is running the pornography internally because the external access has been restricted. This is a clinical issue, not a willpower one, and it tends to resolve as trauma, attachment, and shame-based drivers get treated directly. It is exactly the kind of pattern therapy is built for.
What to Do NextIf you have been doing Covenant Eyes on your own and the addiction has not actually resolved, the work that comes next is not harder software. It is the clinical work that software was never designed to replace. A free consultation is a good place to start, and it costs you nothing to find out what might actually be underneath what you have been fighting. You can reach us here whenever you are ready.
You can learn every phrase. “I hear you.” “That makes sense.” “I’m not going to get defensive right now.” And your partner’s body can still be on guard when you walk into the room.
https://youtu.be/s_NhBOl_QWE
That gap, between the words you’ve practiced and what her nervous system reads off of you, is the whole problem. A viral Instagram carousel from @threepercent.co named this recently with seven markers of a safe man, and it circulated widely because women recognized the pattern in their own relationships. We want to take those markers seriously, put some clinical weight behind them, and be honest about what they actually ask of a man who wants to be genuinely safe rather than just convincingly safe.
We’ve watched guys take the language home from session and deliver it almost perfectly. It doesn’t land the same. Their partners come back the next week still not breathing easier, and they don’t know why.
It’s because safety is not something you say. It’s something she feels in her body.
Safety Lives in the Body, Not in the ScriptHere’s what most men miss: safety isn’t a decision your partner makes with her thinking mind. It’s an assessment her nervous system runs continuously, below her conscious awareness. Stephen Porges, the neuroscientist who developed polyvagal theory, calls this neuroception. Porges describes safety as a state that emerges when the nervous system detects cues of genuine connection rather than threat, and those cues are largely physiological before they’re verbal.
In practical terms: her body is scanning for congruence. Your tone, your breathing, the micro-expressions you don’t know you’re making, the quality of your attention, the tension in your jaw. Those signals land before your words do. If the signals say “I am here, I am with you, I can handle this moment” and your words say the same thing, her system can start to settle. If the signals and the words disagree, her body believes the signals. Every time.
This is why rehearsed responses fail. A man who has memorized “I’m going to listen without getting defensive” while holding a jaw like a closed fist and a voice pitched two notes too high is telling his partner two different things at once. Her nervous system picks the more honest message.
The partners we sit with are rarely confused about whether their husband is saying nice things. They’re trying to make sense of why they still don’t feel calm in the same room with him.
Safe Is Not the Same as NiceA lot of men conflate being a safe man with being a nice man. They are not the same thing, and the difference matters.
Nice is a surface posture. A nice man is easy to be around. He doesn’t start fights. He smooths things over. He’s well liked. He might also be conflict-avoidant, image-managing, quietly resentful, and deeply invested in being seen as one of the good ones. None of that is necessarily wrong. But none of it is safety.
Safe is structural. A safe man holds a steady internal state under pressure. He stays present in hard conversations without collapsing or escalating. He tells the truth even when the truth is awkward. He can be disagreed with without retaliating in a hundred small ways over the next three days. You can lean your weight on a safe man and the floor doesn’t give.
Nice men often can’t hold that. Nice men often fold or freeze, then make the relationship pay for it later. Partners of nice men describe a particular kind of loneliness: “He never does anything wrong, but I still can’t exhale.”
The guys we sit with who are furthest from safe are often the ones most convinced they’re the good ones. Being nice was their whole strategy for avoiding becoming their fathers. It’s not enough.
The 7 Markers of a Safe Man (and Their Counterfeits)Every marker below has a counterfeit version that looks similar from the outside and reads completely different inside her body. If you’re wondering whether you’re the real version or the convincing imitation, there’s a good chance her body has been picking up the difference for a long time.
- He Regulates Himself Before He EngagesThe real version: he notices he’s activated, slows down, breathes, and comes back to the conversation from a steadier place. He can tolerate his own discomfort long enough to stay available to her.
The counterfeit: he’s “calm,” which means he’s detached, withdrawn, or smug. He uses his composure as a weapon. The message is “I’m fine. You’re the emotional one.” Her body reads that as abandonment, not regulation.
Regulation is not the absence of feeling. It’s the capacity to feel it and stay connected at the same time.
- He Doesn’t Weaponize What She’s Told HimThe real version: when she’s trusted him with something vulnerable, he treats it as sacred. He doesn’t bring it up in the middle of an argument to win.
The counterfeit: ammunition collection disguised as good listening. He seems to be taking it all in. Three weeks later, her words are coming back at her in a fight. Her nervous system files that away: what she shares with him may not actually be safe.
If she’s ever said to you “I can’t believe you just used that against me,” take it seriously. That moment costs more trust than most men realize.
- He’s Genuinely Curious About Her Inner WorldThe real version: he asks, and he actually wants to know. He doesn’t interrupt the answer. He doesn’t correct her interpretation of her own experience. He treats her inner life as its own country that he’s visiting, not a disorder he’s diagnosing.
The counterfeit: explaining her to herself. “You’re not really angry. You’re tired.” “You’re overthinking this.” Esther Perel has written about the pull, in every couple, toward one partner defining reality for the other. In the safe version, both people keep the right to name their own experience.
- He Tells the Truth, Especially About HimselfThe real version: he says the hard thing when it needs to be said, including about his own mistakes, his own patterns, and his own fears. His partner doesn’t have to be a detective to know what’s going on with him.
The counterfeit: strategic disclosure. He tells her what’s useful for her to know. He shades the truth to protect his image. He says “I’m fine” about things he is demonstrably not fine about. She can feel the curation. Living with it is exhausting.
- He Owns Impact Before He Defends IntentThe real version: when she tells him something he did hurt, his first move is to understand the impact. He lets it land before he explains himself.
The counterfeit: “I didn’t mean to” as a conversation closer. His intent becomes the whole subject. He makes her manage his guilt about the thing that hurt her. She ends up comforting him about her own wound, which is disorienting and, over time, crazy-making.
John Gottman’s research has shown for decades that defensiveness is one of the most reliable predictors of relational breakdown. Owning impact is the antidote.
- He Stays Connected Through DisagreementThe real version: he can disagree with her and still feel close to her. He doesn’t need her to be wrong in order to be with him.
The counterfeit: stonewalling dressed up as “keeping the peace.” He goes quiet. He walks away. He comes back hours later as if nothing happened. Her body knows something did happen. Repeated over years, this is one of the most corrosive patterns in a marriage.
- He Does His Own WorkThe real version: he’s in therapy, in a men’s group, reading the books, doing the journaling, talking to a mentor, actually changing. His growth is his responsibility, not her project.
The counterfeit: he outsources his healing to her patience. She becomes the therapist, the accountability partner, the explainer. She carries the cognitive and emotional labor of his change. Murray Bowen’s work on differentiation of self gives us a clear frame for why this pattern is so costly: when an adult fuses his wellbeing with his partner’s responses, satisfaction tends to drop for both people, not just for her. A man who does his own work creates the space for his partner to exist as a person rather than a resource.
Why Defensiveness Is the Quiet KillerIf we had to name the single pattern that undoes the most relationships we sit with, it would not be an explosive one. It would be defensiveness. And defensiveness is almost always self-protection.
That’s the reframe that cracks things open for a lot of men. Defensiveness feels, from the inside, like a reasonable response to unfair attack. From the outside, from inside her body, it lands as “he’s protecting himself from me.” Self-protection does not make your partner calmer. It activates her more.
The shift is from protecting yourself to protecting the bond.
Early in our marriage, if Caleb was stressed about something, he wouldn’t bring it to Verlynda. He told himself he didn’t want to burden her. He thought that was care. What he was actually doing was protecting his own feelings of inadequacy, or shame about a mistake, or the discomfort of not knowing how to solve something. The version of Caleb she got in those moments was a wall. She knew she was being blocked, and the wall felt far less safe to her than whatever mess he was hiding.
That’s the paradox. Self-protection in a marriage almost always reduces safety for your partner, because what she registers is not your fine language about “giving you space to handle it.” She registers the closed door.
There’s a harder layer underneath this for some men. If you grew up inside patriarchal or misogynistic messaging, some of your baseline scripts about masculinity, emotional expression, authority in a relationship, or what women “really want” are running in the background. You don’t need to be ashamed of having inherited them. You do need to actually examine them. This has to come from a real re-examination of your values, your assumptions, and the way you move through the world. Not a vocabulary swap. Your partner’s nervous system can tell the difference between a man who is saying new words and a man who has actually changed his mind about something fundamental.
The Reality CheckHere’s the part most articles like this leave out.
You don’t become a safe man to convince your partner to stay. You don’t do it to earn the lifting of a consequence. You don’t do it because you’ve made a deal with her.
You become a safe man because that’s who you want to be. Because the version of you who is regulated, honest, non-defensive, curious, and doing his own work is a better man, full stop. If she feels the shift and her body starts to soften, that’s a good outcome. If she needs time, distance, or has already left, the work is still yours. Emotionally Focused Therapy shows us something important here: the attachment repairs that actually hold in couples are the ones tied to observable shifts in how both partners operate at a gut level, not just the words they use. The changes that stick are the ones rooted in actual growth, not in strategic performance.
The women we sit with can often tell when a man is doing the work for her versus doing it because he’s decided he wants to become someone different. Only one of those actually lasts.
This is your work. It is not her persuasion project.
If you want support on that work, we offer counseling specifically for men who want to do the genuine version of this. You can reach out quietly.
ConclusionSeven markers. A dozen counterfeits. One nervous system in your partner’s body that has been running this assessment since long before you knew you needed to take it seriously. The words matter less than you think. A real shift in who you are matters more than you want it to. Her body will know. That is not a threat. That is an invitation to stop performing and start becoming.
Frequently Asked QuestionsHow can I tell if I’m actually a safe man or just performing safety?The clearest indicator is not your self-assessment. It’s how your partner’s body responds to you over time. If she can relax in the same room with you without monitoring, if she brings you her hard things rather than hiding them, if she disagrees with you without bracing, those are nervous-system-level signals that the real thing is landing. If she still flinches, filters, or tiptoes, your words may be right while something deeper is still off.
What’s the difference between a safe man and a nice guy?Nice is a surface posture focused on being well liked and avoiding conflict. Safe is a structural capacity to stay present, regulated, and honest under pressure. A nice guy often folds and then punishes the relationship later for the cost of folding. A safe man can hold steady through disagreement without retaliation or withdrawal.
Can an unsafe man actually change?Yes, and we see it regularly in our practice. The change that sticks is the kind rooted in a real re-examination of a man’s values, defenses, and inherited scripts, usually with clinical or pastoral support. Change driven purely by the fear of losing a partner tends to be performative and collapses under the first real test.
How long does it take for my partner to feel safe again?Her nervous system operates on its own timeline and will not be rushed. For partners who have experienced betrayal trauma, the repair window is typically measured in years, not weeks, and depends more on consistency than intensity. Trying to compress that timeline is itself an unsafe move.
Is my partner’s lack of trust a sign I haven’t changed enough?Not necessarily. Her lack of trust is information, but it is information about her experience, not a verdict on your work. Sometimes the gap is real and you have more work to do. Sometimes the work is done and her body is still catching up. A therapist who works with both of you can help sort which is which.
He told you. Or you found out. Either way, you’re standing in the same room and it feels like the ground just opened up underneath you.
https://youtu.be/EZTw3clH99g
If you’re dealing with a porn addiction relapse right now, whether you’re the one who slipped or the partner who just learned about it, the next 72 hours matter more than you think. Not because this moment defines your entire recovery, but because what you both do right now will determine whether this setback becomes useful data or the beginning of the end.
This article is a protocol. Not a lecture, not a pep talk. A step-by-step guide for couples who want to survive a relapse without burning down everything they’ve been building. We’ll walk through what both of you need to do, what to avoid, and why this moment, handled well, can actually make your recovery stronger than it was before.
But before any of that, we need to answer a question most people skip entirely.
Wait: Is This Actually a Relapse?The word “relapse” gets used loosely, and that’s a problem. Because what you call this moment changes everything about how you respond to it.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, there’s a concept called the “dry drunk.” A dry drunk is someone who has stopped drinking but hasn’t actually engaged in recovery. They’re white-knuckling it. No meetings, no sponsor, no internal work. They’re sober in the narrowest technical sense, but the patterns of thinking and relating that fueled the addiction are completely intact. When a dry drunk picks up a drink again, that’s not a relapse. That’s a continuation of the same addiction with a gap in the middle.
The Dry Drunk Pattern in Porn AddictionThe same pattern shows up in porn addiction recovery, and it’s more common than most people realize. Some men stop viewing pornography for weeks or months, and their partners believe recovery is working. But nothing has actually changed underneath. There’s no therapeutic work, no accountability structure, no honest self-examination. The person has simply extended the period between acting out sessions. When they use pornography again, the spouse experiences it as a devastating relapse. But clinically, this isn’t a relapse in recovery. This is an active addiction running at a lower frequency.
That distinction matters. It matters for the person using pornography, because it tells them the truth about where they actually are. And it matters for the partner, because the response to a relapse in genuine recovery looks very different from the response to discovering that recovery was never happening in the first place.
The Three-Circle Framework: Naming What HappenedIn CSAT (Certified Sex Addiction Therapist) treatment, we use the three-circle worksheet to help individuals define their own boundaries with precision. The inner circle (red) contains the behaviors that constitute a full relapse: the specific sexual behaviors the person has committed to abstaining from. The middle circle (yellow) contains the warning signs and boundary behaviors, the slippery slope: lingering on social media, searching for triggering content, isolating. These are slips. The outer circle (green) contains healthy recovery behaviors.
A slip is a yellow-circle moment. It’s a warning sign that something in the recovery plan needs attention. A relapse is a red inner-circle event. Both require a response, but the severity, the clinical meaning, and the conversation with your partner are different.
If you and your therapist haven’t built a three-circle plan yet, that’s the first conversation to have after you finish reading this.
Why You Can Only Relapse If You’re Actually in RecoveryThis is the reframe most couples miss, and it’s the one that changes the emotional temperature of the room.
You cannot relapse from something you were never recovering from. The word “relapse” only applies when a person has been actively engaged in recovery: working with a therapist or group, building accountability, doing the internal work of understanding their triggers and patterns. When someone in that process stumbles, it’s a setback within a genuine effort. It is not a return to square one.
Relapses are to be expected in recovery. That is not an excuse to have them. But it is a clinical reality that reshapes how both partners can think about what just happened. If he relapsed, it means he was actually in recovery. If she slipped, it means she had built something real enough to slip from. The addiction didn’t win. The recovery hit a complication.
The Neural Reset FallacyOne of the most damaging beliefs couples carry into a relapse is the idea that one slip erases months of brain healing. It doesn’t. Neuroscience research on addiction recovery consistently shows that the neural pathways built during sustained recovery, the strengthened prefrontal cortex, the reduced reactivity in the reward system, do not vanish after a single episode. A 2019 review published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews found that recovery-related brain changes are cumulative, and while a relapse can temporarily reactivate old pathways, it does not eliminate the structural gains made during abstinence.
Your brain keeps the progress. The work you put in is still there. What a relapse reveals is not that recovery failed, but that there’s a specific vulnerability in the recovery plan that needs to be addressed.
The 72-Hour Relapse ProtocolThe first three days after a relapse are the highest-risk window for both the person in recovery and the relationship. Emotions are raw. Fear is running the show. This is when couples make the decisions they regret most: ultimatums, moving out, ending therapy, or on the other side, minimizing, lying about the scope, or retreating into silence.
What follows is a protocol. It won’t make the pain disappear, but it will keep both of you from making this moment worse than it already is.
For the Person in Recovery: Disclose, Don’t HideIf you have a disclosure agreement with your partner, honor it. That means telling them within 24 hours. Not waiting for them to find out. Not testing whether they’ll notice. Not telling yourself you’ll mention it at the next therapy session.
The problem we see most often in clinical practice is not the relapse itself. It’s the delay. When a person waits days or weeks to disclose, or when the partner discovers it on their own, the betrayal of the concealment often causes more damage than the relapse. The partner’s internal narrative shifts from “he slipped” to “he’s been lying to me again.”
Here is the reframe worth sitting with: proactive disclosure is one of the only moments in early recovery where you can actively earn trust. When you come to your partner before being caught, you are demonstrating that honoring the relationship matters more to you than protecting yourself from shame. That doesn’t obligate your partner to feel better about it right away. But it changes what kind of moment this is. It shifts the story from “I was caught again” to “he came to me.” That distinction is not small. It’s one of the most concrete, visible acts of vulnerability available in recovery, and over time, these moments are what rebuild trust.
After disclosure, do two things immediately.
First, run a HALT-B audit. HALT-B stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired, Bored. These five states are the most common entry points for a slip. Before you do anything else, identify which one (or which combination) was present in the hours leading up to the relapse. This isn’t about making excuses. It’s about identifying the gap in your recovery plan.
For example, if the HALT-B audit shows “Bored” every time a slip happens, the data tells you something important: the recovery plan isn’t missing willpower. It’s missing meaningful engagement, connection, or structure in the hours where idle time becomes dangerous. That’s a solvable problem. And you would never have identified it without treating the relapse as information.
Second, journal the emotional lead-up. Write down what you were feeling in the hours before the relapse. Not what happened, but what you were feeling. Were you anxious? Resentful? Disconnected from your partner? Overwhelmed at work? This becomes clinical data. Bring it to your next session and let your therapist help you trace the thread. Every relapse that gets worked through this way makes the recovery more watertight, because it reveals the areas that haven’t been addressed deeply enough yet.
For the Partner: Feel Everything, Decide NothingYour pain is real and it deserves to be felt. But the first 24 to 48 hours after learning about a relapse are not the time to make permanent decisions. This is the Power of the Pause.
When the nervous system is in fight, flight, or freeze mode, the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for rational decision-making, is significantly impaired. The urge to act immediately, to move out, to end the marriage, to call his mother, to check his phone, is not wisdom. It’s survival response. Those urges make sense. They are your body trying to protect you. But acting on them in this window often creates consequences that outlast the crisis.
The rule: no big decisions for 24 to 48 hours. If you’ve already built a boundaries plan with your therapist, now is the time to refer back to it. A prepared list of options is far more reliable than a plan made from panic. If you haven’t built one yet, that becomes the next priority after this crisis stabilizes.
When you’re ready to talk (not in the first hour, not when you’re still shaking), use the Softened Startup. This is a technique drawn from the Gottman method, and it follows a simple structure: Observation, then Feeling, then Need.
It might sound robotic at first, and you might have to say it through tears or gritted teeth, but try to move from “You lied again” to “I am terrified right now because I feel like the ground has shifted, and I need a clear plan for what tomorrow looks like.”
Compare that with the alternative: “You promised me this wouldn’t happen again. You’re never going to change.”
The first version expresses the same pain. But it keeps the door open for a response that isn’t pure shame. And that matters, because when the person in recovery gets hit with what John Gottman calls a “harsh startup,” the most common reaction is shutdown. Not because they don’t care, but because shame floods the nervous system and makes honest conversation neurologically impossible. The Softened Startup protects your right to be heard while giving the conversation a chance of actually going somewhere useful.
Two Ways Couples Navigate a RelapseIn online support communities where couples share their experiences publicly, two patterns emerge repeatedly. One leads to deeper isolation. The other leads to deeper recovery.
| Poor Navigation (Addict Logic) | Successful Navigation (Recovery Protocol) | | --- | --- | | Discovery: The partner has to find out on their own | Disclosure: The individual tells proactively | | Secrecy: “I’m protecting you by lying” | Transparency: “I’m honoring you by being honest” | | Isolation: “I can fix this on my own” | Community: Using a CSAT, sponsor, or group | | Shame-Spiral: “I’m a failure, everything is ruined” | Curiosity: “What was the trigger? Let me run HALT-B” |
The left column is not a character flaw. It’s what addiction logic sounds like: self-protective, isolation-driven, shame-based. Every person in early recovery will default to the left column unless they’ve practiced the right one. That’s what the protocol is for. You don’t rise to the level of your intentions in a crisis. You fall to the level of your preparation.
If you recognize your pattern in the left column, that recognition is itself a recovery moment. The question isn’t whether you’ve done it wrong before. The question is whether you’re willing to build the structure that makes the right column possible next time.
What Comes After the ProtocolOnce the first 72 hours have passed and both of you have stabilized, three things need to happen.
First, bring the relapse into your next therapy session. Not as a confession, but as clinical material. The journal notes, the HALT-B audit, the emotional lead-up: all of it is data. A skilled CSAT therapist will use that data to identify the gaps in the current recovery plan. Maybe the triggers were emotional and the plan was too behavioral. Maybe the accountability structure had a blind spot. Every relapse, when it’s processed in session, makes the recovery plan more precise.
Second, revisit the three-circle worksheet together. Does it still reflect reality? Have any yellow-circle behaviors shifted closer to red? Have new warning signs appeared that weren’t on the original list? The worksheet is a living document. It should evolve as recovery deepens.
Third, talk about what the partner needs going forward. Not what the person in recovery thinks they need. What the partner actually says they need. That conversation requires the Softened Startup structure and a therapist in the room if possible. The partner may need increased transparency, more frequent check-ins, a temporary change in living arrangements, or simply to hear, clearly and without defensiveness, that their pain is understood.
Recovery from pornography addiction is not a straight line. Research published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions consistently shows that setbacks are a normative part of the recovery process for compulsive sexual behaviors, not an indicator of treatment failure. The couples who make it through are not the ones who never relapse. They are the ones who built a protocol for when it happens, and then they used it.
The next 72 hours are about stability, not perfection. Below are the most common questions we hear from couples in this exact moment to help clear the fog.
Is it normal to relapse during porn addiction recovery?Yes. Relapse is a recognized and expected part of the recovery process for compulsive sexual behaviors. Research consistently shows that setbacks occur in the majority of addiction recovery trajectories. A relapse does not mean recovery has failed. It means there is a specific vulnerability in the current recovery plan that needs clinical attention. The key factor is how the relapse is handled: whether it’s concealed or disclosed, and whether the emotional lead-up is examined and brought into therapy.
What is the difference between a slip and a relapse in porn addiction?In CSAT treatment, a slip refers to a middle-circle (yellow) behavior: a warning sign or boundary behavior like lingering on social media or seeking out triggering content. A relapse is an inner-circle (red) behavior, meaning a return to the specific sexual behaviors the person committed to abstaining from. Both require attention, but the clinical severity and the conversation with a partner are different. A three-circle worksheet, built with a therapist, defines these boundaries for each individual.
How do I tell my partner about a porn addiction relapse?Disclose proactively within 24 hours. Do not wait for your partner to discover it on their own. Be direct about what happened without minimizing or over-explaining. Use a calm setting, not in front of children or during an argument. If you have a disclosure agreement from therapy, follow it. Proactive disclosure, while painful, is one of the most concrete trust-building actions available in recovery because it demonstrates that honesty matters more than self-protection.
Does a porn addiction relapse erase recovery progress?No. Neuroscience research shows that the brain changes built during sustained recovery, including strengthened prefrontal cortex function and reduced reward-system reactivity, are cumulative and do not disappear after a single episode. A relapse may temporarily reactivate old neural pathways, but the structural gains from months of recovery remain intact. The “reset to zero” belief is a myth that causes unnecessary despair.
Should we go back to couples therapy after a relapse?Yes, and ideally with a therapist trained in sex addiction recovery (CSAT) or betrayal trauma. The relapse provides valuable clinical data: the emotional triggers, the HALT-B state, and the gaps in the current recovery plan. Bringing that data into a therapy session allows both partners to process the event together and update the recovery plan. Many couples find that the work done after a relapse is some of the most productive work in their entire recovery.
A porn addiction relapse is not a verdict on your marriage, your recovery, or your character. It is a moment that reveals where the recovery plan needs to go deeper. If you and your partner are navigating a relapse right now and want clinical support to process it together, a free consultation is a good place to start.
You’ve probably never told anyone.
https://youtu.be/jOWTi9qscTo
Not your best friend. Not your partner. Definitely not your therapist. Because every article you’ve found about pornography addiction was written for someone else. Every recovery group is 90% men. Every cautionary story starts with “he.” And somewhere along the way, you quietly concluded that whatever is happening to you must make you some kind of anomaly. A freak. A woman who broke the rules of what women are supposed to struggle with.
You’re not a freak. And you are not alone.
Porn addiction in women is real, it is increasing, and the silence around it has far less to do with how many women struggle and far more to do with a culture that never built a category for your experience. If you’ve been searching for something that finally names what you’re going through, this article is for you.
You’re Not Alone. You’ve Just Been Invisible.If you’ve listened to Normalize therapy. for a while, you may have noticed that most of our pornography content has been written for and about men. That’s a gap worth naming, because that silence is part of what compounds the shame for women who struggle.
Here’s what the numbers actually show. A 2024 Barna study found that 44% of women view pornography at least occasionally, up from 39% just eight years earlier. By the end of 2024, nearly 4 in 10 users on the largest pornography platform in the world were female. A 2019 German research study found that approximately 3% of women in their sample experienced what researchers classified as problematic pornography use, with emotional avoidance as a primary predictor.
These aren’t small, fringe numbers. And they’ve been climbing for over a decade. When we ran an informal poll of our audience fifteen years ago, roughly 10% of women said they’d viewed pornography in the previous month. Five years later, that number was 30%. The research has been catching up to what many women already knew in private: this isn’t a “male problem.” It’s a human one. And the longer we pretend otherwise, the longer women suffer without support.
Why Women Use Pornography (And What the Research Actually Says)There’s a common assumption that men use pornography for the visual stimulation and women use it for emotional reasons. The truth is more complicated, and more important to understand.
A large-scale 2020 study published in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors examined pornography use motivations across multiple samples totaling over 2,600 participants. The researchers found that men scored higher than women on nearly every motivation, including stress relief, emotional distraction, and boredom avoidance. The assumption that women use pornography for emotional reasons while men use it for the visual experience is not what the data shows. Both groups use it to regulate how they feel, and men do so at higher rates by self-report.
What tends to differ, in our clinical experience, is the self-awareness women bring when they seek help: they have often already named the loneliness or the anxiety that drives the pattern. Many men arrive at that understanding later in recovery. For women, knowing exactly why you’re doing something and still being unable to stop creates its own particular kind of anguish.
The Erotica GatewayIt’s also worth naming that for many women, the entry point isn’t a video. It’s a story. Explicit novels, fan fiction, audio erotica, series like Fifty Shades of Grey. These feel safer, more socially acceptable, and easier to dismiss as “just reading.” But the neurological pathway is the same. The dopamine cycle doesn’t distinguish between a screen and a page. And because narrative pornography carries less cultural stigma, many women are further along in a compulsive pattern before they recognize it as one.
Not Escape. Survival.A 2024 narrative review in Current Addiction Reports confirmed what clinicians have observed for years: pornography is frequently used to regulate unpleasant emotional states or to cope with stressful life events. While it may provide temporary relief, the researchers found that difficulties in emotion regulation and dysfunctional coping strategies are significant risk factors for pornography use becoming problematic.
For some women, this coping function runs even deeper. When pornography use is rooted in past sexual trauma, it can serve as a dissociative survival mechanism: a way to experience something adjacent to intimacy without the vulnerability or the risk of being hurt again. This is the fawn response at work. The part of you that learned to manage threat by accommodating found a way to experience connection that felt controllable. That’s not a moral failure. That’s a nervous system doing what it was designed to do in the face of unbearable circumstances.
The Double Shame: Why This Hits Women DifferentlyEvery person who struggles with compulsive pornography use carries shame. But women carry a second layer that most men never encounter. To understand why, it helps to hear it in the words of women who have lived it.
Throughout this article, we’ve drawn on the voices of women who’ve shared their experiences in public online support communities. Their words describe something clinical language rarely captures.
One woman described it this way: “I feel ruined, dirty. I can’t help but think I’m a bad person. It feels like whatever good acts I do in real life don’t matter because of the things I’ve sought pleasure in.” That shame isn’t proportional to the behavior. It’s totalizing. It attaches to her entire identity, not just the pattern she wants to change. You can read more about why the shame and relapse cycle feeds itself — and what breaks it.
This compound shame has specific roots, and naming them is part of loosening their grip.
The “Visual Myth”We are culturally conditioned to believe women are relational and men are visual. When a woman finds herself compulsively drawn to visual sexual content, she doesn’t just feel guilty about the behavior. She feels like she’s failed a fundamental standard of what it means to be female. The research doesn’t support this binary, but the cultural messaging is powerful enough to make a woman feel like something is neurologically wrong with her before she ever considers that she might simply be human.
The Madonna-Whore Dichotomy, InternalizedIn many cultural and religious contexts, a woman is either the virtuous wife and mother or the promiscuous outsider. There is rarely a category for “the virtuous woman who struggles with compulsion.” Without that middle ground, a woman’s brain is left to sort her into one of two boxes. And the one it chooses is almost always the cruel one.
The Absence of MirrorsBecause the vast majority of recovery resources, support groups, and clinical language around pornography addiction have been written by men for men, women don’t see themselves in the solution. One woman wrote: “I feel like a total freak because every space for this is 90% men.” That absence of reflection reinforces the lie that she is an anomaly. It’s not that women don’t exist in this struggle. It’s that no one built a room with their name on the door.
Trauma as a Silent DriverFor women whose pornography use is connected to past sexual abuse, sexual violence, or the damaging effects of growing up in environments shaped by patriarchal control, the shame becomes recursive. She’s using a “shameful” tool to manage unbearable pain, and each use confirms the internal narrative that she is beyond help. A 2024 systematic review on the intersection of interpersonal trauma, shame, and substance use found robust associations across varied populations: increased shame is consistently linked to greater compulsive behavior among survivors of interpersonal violence. The cycle feeds itself until someone intervenes with compassion rather than judgment.
What Porn Addiction Actually Looks Like in WomenOne reason women struggle longer in silence is that the most commonly discussed warning sign of pornography addiction, erectile dysfunction, simply doesn’t apply to them. As one woman observed in a public online support community: “It’s very easy for women to ignore these things since the signs of overstimulation and sexual dysfunction are only obvious in men.” Without that visible “canary in the coal mine,” the pattern can entrench itself for years before a woman recognizes what’s happening.
Here are the signs that matter, and the clinical reasons behind each one.
You keep going back despite wanting to stopThis is the core marker. Not frequency. Not content type. The defining feature of compulsive pornography use is repeated failure to stop despite consistent effort and genuine desire to quit. A 2023 qualitative study of women with self-identified problematic pornography use found that every participant reported wanting to stop but being unable to, despite repeated and sustained attempts.
You use pornography to manage emotions, not just for pleasureIf you notice a pattern where you reach for pornography when you’re lonely, anxious, bored, or emotionally overwhelmed rather than when you’re simply aroused, the behavior has shifted from recreational to regulatory. This is one of the strongest predictors of problematic use across all genders.
You feel worse afterward, not betterThe temporary relief gives way to shame, self-disgust, or emotional numbness. Over time, the gap between the relief and the crash gets shorter. You need more to feel less.
It’s changing how you see yourselfSelf-objectification is a particular risk for women. If consuming pornography is distorting how you view your own body, your worth, or your desirability, or if you find yourself performing sexuality in ways that feel disconnected from your own desire, the pattern is doing more than occupying your time. It’s reshaping your self-concept.
You’re hiding it in ways that feel familiarClearing browser history. Staying up after your partner falls asleep. Building a secret compartment in your life that no one else can access. The concealment itself becomes its own source of shame, separate from the behavior. If the hiding has become as compulsive as the use, that’s significant.
A Recovery Path That Was Actually Built for YouMost of the recovery frameworks women encounter were designed with male neurology and male shame patterns in mind. That’s not a criticism of those frameworks. It’s an acknowledgment that you deserve something that accounts for your experience specifically.
Internal Family Systems: Meeting the Part That Seeks ComfortInternal Family Systems therapy offers something particularly valuable for women in this struggle. Rather than treating the compulsive behavior as an enemy to defeat, IFS recognizes that the part of you reaching for pornography has a positive intention. It’s trying to protect you. It’s trying to soothe something that feels unbearable. It learned this strategy because, at some point, it was the best option available.
A 2021 pilot study of IFS therapy for adults with histories of multiple childhood traumas found significant reductions in PTSD symptoms, depression, and disrupted self-perception, including shame and guilt. Participants also showed meaningful improvements in self-compassion. The approach works because it doesn’t start by demanding you stop. It starts by asking: what is this part of you carrying, and what does it need from you instead?
Compassion-Focused Therapy: Replacing the Inner CriticFor women whose shame voice is relentless, the “I’m dirty, I’m ruined, nothing good I do matters” voice, Compassion-Focused Therapy directly targets that internal critic. CFT builds the capacity to respond to yourself with the same warmth you’d offer a friend in pain. This isn’t about letting yourself off the hook. It’s about recognizing that shame-driven recovery doesn’t produce lasting change. Compassion-driven recovery does.
What Recovery Actually Looks LikeRecovery for women often means addressing the root before the branch. If pornography use is connected to unprocessed trauma, loneliness, attachment wounds, or emotional dysregulation, sustainable change requires working on those underlying drivers, not just managing the surface behavior. It also means finding spaces where you’re not the only woman in the room. Group therapy, women-specific recovery programs, and working with a counselor who understands the female experience of this struggle can make the difference between feeling like an outsider in your own recovery and finally being seen. If you’re wondering what the road ahead actually looks like, our article on the pornography addiction recovery timeline gives a realistic picture of what to expect.
You Were Never the Wrong Kind of Person to Have This ProblemIf you’ve spent years believing that your struggle makes you a freak, a failure, or some kind of biological error, we want to name something clearly: you are not broken. You are a person with a nervous system that found a way to cope with something that felt unbearable. The pathway your brain built was doing its job. It was protecting you the only way it knew how.
That’s not a character flaw. That’s a pathway. And pathways can be rebuilt.
The courage it takes for a woman to say “I struggle with this” in a world that insists she shouldn’t is extraordinary. If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself for the first time, that recognition is not the problem. It’s the first real step out of the silence.
You don’t have to do this alone. And you don’t have to do it in a room that was built for someone else.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat are the signs of porn addiction in women?The most significant sign is repeated inability to stop despite genuinely wanting to. Other indicators include using pornography primarily to manage emotions like loneliness, anxiety, or boredom rather than for pleasure; feeling worse after use rather than better; noticing changes in how you view your own body or sexuality; and engaging in increasing concealment behaviors. Because women lack the most commonly discussed physical warning sign (erectile dysfunction), the pattern often goes unrecognized longer.
Why do women start using pornography?Women use pornography for many of the same reasons men do: stress relief, boredom, sexual curiosity, and emotional regulation. Research shows that emotional avoidance and loneliness are significant predictors of problematic use in women. For some women, past sexual trauma or unprocessed pain drives the behavior as a dissociative coping mechanism. The entry point is also often different: many women begin through written erotica or narrative content before progressing to visual pornography.
Is porn addiction in women different from men?The underlying neurological mechanism is the same: the brain’s reward system becomes dependent on the dopamine release pornography provides. The primary differences are social and psychological. Women typically carry a compounded shame because the culture frames pornography as a “male problem,” leaving women without recovery mirrors or language for their experience. Women are also more likely to be aware of the emotional regulation function of their use from the beginning.
How do women recover from pornography addiction?Effective recovery for women often involves therapies that address shame and emotional regulation directly, such as Internal Family Systems (IFS) or Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT). Because many women’s pornography use is connected to underlying trauma, loneliness, or attachment wounds, treatment that addresses these root causes produces more lasting change than behavioral management alone. Women-specific support groups and working with a counselor experienced in female sexual compulsivity are also important.
Can pornography addiction cause relationship problems for women?Yes. Compulsive pornography use can erode sexual satisfaction within relationships, distort body image and sexual self-concept, create secrecy that damages trust, and interfere with genuine emotional and physical intimacy. Women may also experience a disconnect between the sexuality they perform and the desire they actually feel, which strains both their relationship with a partner and their relationship with their own body.
If anything in this article resonated with you, a free consultation is a good place to start. You don’t need to have it all figured out. You just need to not be alone with it anymore. Our team at Therapevo’s sex addiction counseling practice works with women navigating exactly this, and the first conversation is always confidential and free of judgment.
If you’ve asked this question, you’ve probably already lived the argument. You brought it up, and it got dismissed. “It’s just porn.” “You’re being unrealistic.” “Every guy does this.” And somewhere in the middle of that conversation, the focus shifted from what happened to you, to whether you even had the right to call it what it felt like.
https://youtu.be/y7cws2if73k
Is watching porn cheating? The honest answer is that it depends on how you define fidelity, and that the definitional debate is often exactly where the conversation gets weaponized against the person who was hurt.
This article won’t tell you what to call it. What it will do is give you the research, the clinical picture, and a clear framework for understanding what pornography use actually does to a relationship. You can decide what you want to call it after that.
The Debate Gets Used Against YouThere is a particular kind of conversation that happens when a partner brings up pornography use. The person who was hurt asks a legitimate question. The person who used it offers a technical defense. And the conversation moves from “what happened and how do we address it” to “can you even prove this is a real problem.”
The Language of MinimizingIn our practice, we hear the same phrases repeatedly from partners who use pornography. “It’s not like I slept with anyone.” “You’re the only one I’m with in real life.” “It doesn’t mean anything.” “Every guy does this.”
Each of those statements may be technically true. Each of them also redirects attention away from the actual question, which is: what has this done to us?
This is what we call minimizing language. It isn’t always calculated or deliberate. Sometimes the person saying it genuinely believes it. But the effect is the same. The focus moves from the harm to the definition, and the partner who was hurt is left carrying the burden of proof.
What You Are Actually AskingMost partners who bring this question into our office aren’t asking for a verdict. They’re asking whether their own pain makes sense. They’ve been told, explicitly or implicitly, that their response is excessive. They want to know if there’s a legitimate basis for what they’re feeling.
There is. And the research is clear about why.
What the Research Actually ShowsThe evidence on pornography’s impact on relationships has grown substantially over the past two decades. What it consistently shows is that regular pornography use is not neutral for the people in a committed relationship, or for the relationship itself.
How It Changes the Way Partners See Each OtherA 2016 study by Rasmussen documented something researchers call contrast effects, meaning the brain begins comparing a real partner unfavorably to the people in pornography, which progressively erodes satisfaction with the actual relationship. The person using pornography may not be making these comparisons consciously. But the neural pattern is being built regardless, and it shows up in reduced desire and increasing dissatisfaction with the actual relationship.
This isn’t a moral claim. It’s a neurological one. The brain responds to repeated visual stimulation by recalibrating its expectations. A real partner, with a real body and a real life, tends to lose that comparison.
What It Does to HerA 2012 study by Stewart and Szymanski found that a partner’s pornography use predicted lower relationship quality and lower self-esteem in female partners. Critically, the research showed that self-esteem was mediated, meaning it was the pathway through which pornography use damaged the relationship, not just a side effect. Her sense of herself as desirable, valuable, and enough was being eroded, and that erosion was the mechanism through which the relationship deteriorated.
Crawford and colleagues, in a 2023 grounded theory study (a qualitative research method where patterns emerge directly from participants’ own words rather than from a predetermined hypothesis), interviewed women whose partners had used pornography. What they found was that these women described the experience using language nearly identical to how people describe discovering a physical affair: betrayal, rupture of trust, and a fundamental questioning of the entire relationship.
The Attachment Injury UnderneathResearch by Zitzman and Butler (2009) tracked what happened to relationships over time when pornography use was present. What they found was a progression they described as an attachment fault line. A fault line is a fracture in the relational foundation. Left unaddressed, it develops into a rift (a significant break in the emotional bond) and eventually estrangement (full emotional withdrawal from the relationship). These aren’t just evocative terms. They describe measurable stages in a relational process.
Why This Feels Like Betrayal Even Without a Physical ActIntimate partnership is built on emotional availability, responsiveness, and the sense that your partner is orienting toward you. What pornography use often does, even when kept entirely secret, is create a competing source of sexual arousal that bypasses the actual partner.
The betrayed partner often senses this before they have language for it. A feeling that something is off. A distance they can’t explain. A sense that their partner is physically present but somewhere else entirely. When they eventually discover the pornography use, they frequently describe it as confirmation of what they already knew, not as new information.
That felt sense of absence is real. And it precedes the discovery.
For more on how this kind of betrayal registers neurologically and physiologically, how betrayal trauma impacts the brain and body goes deeper on the physical experience of discovering a partner’s hidden behavior.
The Secrecy FactorOne of the clearest indicators that a behavior has crossed a relational boundary is that it requires concealment to continue. If pornography use were genuinely neutral for a relationship, it wouldn’t need to be hidden from a partner. Most pornography use in committed relationships involves exactly that: deleted browser history, use during times when a partner won’t notice, active denial if asked directly.
The secrecy isn’t incidental. It reflects an awareness, however suppressed, that the partner would not consent to the behavior if they knew about it. That awareness matters, because it means one person has been making unilateral decisions about the terms of the relationship.
What Fidelity Actually RequiresThis is where the definitional question is worth engaging directly. Fidelity, in its classical sense, doesn’t mean physical exclusivity alone. It means loyalty, trustworthiness, and the consistent prioritization of the relationship.
The Ogling QuestionThere is a meaningful distinction between noticing that someone is attractive and choosing to pursue that attraction. A committed person can find other people attractive. That’s not a failure of fidelity. What changes the relational calculus is intentionality: seeking out content for the purpose of sexual arousal, returning to it repeatedly, and keeping that behavior hidden from a partner.
The question we sometimes put to couples in our office is this: Is your sexual attention something your partner would recognize as theirs? Or has a significant portion of it moved somewhere else?
That question tends to cut through the definitional debate fairly quickly.
What Partners Consistently Name as the LossWhen we sit with betrayed partners, what they grieve isn’t usually an abstract principle. They grieve specific things: the feeling that they were enough. The assumption that their partner’s desire was oriented toward them. The belief that what they had was exclusive, even if the specific terms were never formally negotiated.
These are legitimate relational expectations in a committed partnership. Their loss is a genuine injury, regardless of what we decide to call the cause.
For the Man Who Is WatchingIf you’ve read this far and you’re the one who has been using pornography, this section isn’t written to condemn you. We work with men in this situation regularly, and what we see is that this behavior rarely started as an act of disregard for a partner. It usually started much earlier, often in adolescence, as a way to manage stress or loneliness or boredom, before any partner existed to be hurt by it.
But you’re not in adolescence now.
Seeing the Full PictureThe research above describes, with some precision, what your use is doing to your partner. The contrast effects quietly reshaping how you perceive her. The self-esteem pathway through which she is being harmed. The attachment fault line opening underneath your relationship, whether you can see it or not.
Most men who come into our office didn’t think it was doing that. They had operated on the assumption that what happened on a screen had nothing to do with what happened in the relationship. That assumption, the research is clear, is wrong.
And now that you can see it more clearly, the question worth sitting with is this: knowing the pain this is causing her, what would you do to actually protect her? Not just to stop a behavior, but to become someone she can feel safe with again?
What Protection Actually Looks LikeStopping the behavior is necessary. It isn’t sufficient.
Genuine recovery means developing the capacity to be with the internal states that pornography was previously managing: stress, loneliness, boredom, emotional discomfort. That capacity can be built. It’s the actual work of recovery, and it changes not just the behavior but the person behind it.
Pornography use tends to narrow emotional range over time. Recovery tends to expand it. The expanded capacity for presence, attunement, and genuine connection is what healthy intimacy actually requires. And it’s available to you, even if it doesn’t feel that way right now.
If you’re ready to figure out what that process looks like in practice, a free consultation is a good starting point.
If you and your partner are both trying to find a way forward together, infidelity recovery for couples is built for exactly this kind of breach. It provides a structured framework for rebuilding trust when one partner’s hidden behavior has damaged the foundation.
Frequently Asked QuestionsIs watching pornography considered cheating?Whether pornography use constitutes cheating depends on the agreements within your relationship and how you define fidelity. What the research clearly shows is that regular pornography use causes measurable harm to partners’ self-esteem and relationship satisfaction, and that partners consistently describe the experience using the same language as infidelity. Whether or not you call it cheating, the relational harm is real and worth addressing directly.
Why does my partner’s porn use feel like a betrayal even if we never discussed it?Most people in committed relationships carry an implicit expectation of sexual exclusivity, even without explicitly negotiating it. When pornography use is discovered, particularly when it has been kept secret, the breach of that implicit agreement is experienced as a betrayal of trust. Research using participants’ own words consistently finds that the experience closely parallels what people describe after discovering a physical affair.
Can a marriage recover from pornography use?Recovery is possible, and we have seen it happen. But it requires more than stopping the behavior. It requires the person who used pornography to develop genuine understanding of the harm caused, to build transparency as a relational practice, and to develop healthier ways of managing the internal states that pornography was previously managing. It also requires real support for the betrayed partner, who has experienced a real injury and needs real recovery, not just reassurance.
Should we go to couples counseling if my partner has been using pornography?Couples counseling can be helpful, but the readiness and motivation of both partners matters enormously. If the partner who used pornography is not yet genuinely accountable, couples work can inadvertently become another arena for minimizing. Individual support for the betrayed partner is often the right first step. When both partners are ready to engage honestly, infidelity recovery for couples provides a structured framework for working through the breach together.
What is the difference between porn use and cheating?Pornography use and a physical affair differ in their mechanics, but they share a relational structure: a hidden behavior, the diversion of sexual energy away from the partner, and the breach of the implicit or explicit terms of fidelity. Research by Crawford and colleagues (2023) found that partners of pornography users describe their experience using language nearly identical to infidelity. The distinction between “porn use” and “cheating” is less clinically meaningful than the question of what the behavior has done to the trust and the attachment between partners.
You’ve probably had the thought at some point: why is this so hard to stop?
https://youtu.be/x1ZnC41N-eM
Not because you haven’t tried. Not because you don’t care. But there’s something willpower alone doesn’t seem to touch, and if you’ve ever wondered whether that something is happening in your brain, you’re asking exactly the right question.
The porn effects on the brain are real, documented, and not a reflection of your character. They are the result of a biological system doing precisely what it was designed to do — just under conditions it was never designed to handle. Understanding what’s actually happening is not just interesting. It changes how you approach recovery.
What Pornography Actually Does to the BrainYour brain runs two systems that are central to this conversation. The first is the mesolimbic dopamine pathway, a deeply wired reward circuit designed to motivate you toward things that matter: nourishment, connection, intimacy. The second is the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s executive control center, which helps you evaluate choices, delay gratification, and regulate your drives.
In healthy sexual experience within a committed relationship, both systems work together. The reward pathway motivates; the prefrontal cortex integrates. You feel desire and can also choose, wait, and be present with another person.
Pornography disrupts this balance. Not because it activates the reward system — that’s exactly what it’s supposed to do — but because of how intensely it activates it. The hyper-stimulation is the problem. And over time, that imbalance produces measurable changes in the brain that most people were never told about.
Designed for Intimacy, Exploited by Pornography: The Mesolimbic Dopamine PathwayThe mesolimbic dopamine pathway is a circuit that runs from a small structure in the midbrain called the ventral tegmental area to the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s core reward center. When you encounter something rewarding, this pathway fires dopamine — a surge of motivation and satisfaction that tells the brain: this matters, do it again.
This system was designed for the deep rewards of real life. Food that sustains you. Connection with people who know you. Sexual intimacy with a committed partner. In that relational context, the mesolimbic pathway does something meaningful: it reinforces bonding, deepens satisfaction, and keeps you oriented toward your partner over time. The dopamine response to sex within a healthy relationship is calibrated, sustainable, and relational.
Pornography activates this same pathway, but at an intensity that no real-world experience can match or sustain. The constant novelty, the visual hyper-stimulation, the absence of relational complexity or cost — these features flood the dopamine system in ways your brain was simply not designed to process. Gary Wilson, who compiled extensive neurological research at YourBrainOnPorn.com, describes this as a supernormal stimulus: something so far outside the natural range that the system begins to miscalibrate in response to it.
Research published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology found that men seeking treatment for problematic pornography use showed increased activation in the ventral striatum — the core of the mesolimbic pathway — specifically in response to pornographic cues. This pattern mirrors the cue reactivity documented in substance addiction. The pathway designed for intimacy is being trained on something that mimics intimacy while systematically exceeding it.
In a healthy relationship, your brain gets a calibrated reward. With pornography, it gets a flood. That distinction matters, and it sets up everything that comes next.
Pathways in the Wilderness: How the Brain Gets HookedThink of the brain’s neural pathways like trails through the wilderness.
One animal moves through the underbrush. Another comes along, notices the knocked-down grass, and follows the same line. A few more animals do the same. Within weeks there’s a worn path. Eventually it becomes a well-traveled trail — the obvious route, the one the brain defaults to without much deliberation.
This is how neural pathways form. As Donald Hebb’s foundational work on synaptic plasticity showed, neurons that fire together wire together. Every time a behavior is repeated, the neural pathway associated with it becomes more defined, more automatic, and easier to activate. This is not a character flaw. It is how learning works at the cellular level.
With pornography, the mesolimbic dopamine pathway described above is the trail being worn. Each session deepens it. Over time, escalation isn’t a deliberate choice — it’s a neurological consequence. The brain, calibrated to a certain level of stimulation, gradually requires more novelty and intensity to produce the same dopamine response. This is tolerance, the same mechanism at work when you stop tasting the salt in food you eat every day.
And here is where this connects directly to what happens next: as the trail through the wilderness deepens and widens, it begins to route around a critical checkpoint. That checkpoint is the prefrontal cortex. The more trafficked the pornography pathway becomes, the less say that checkpoint gets. The trail stops passing through it and starts going around it.
When the Braking System Stops WorkingThe prefrontal cortex is the brain’s braking system — the region responsible for decision-making, impulse control, the ability to pause and choose rather than simply react. In healthy sexual experience within a committed relationship, this system is actively engaged. It is what makes intimacy genuinely relational: the capacity to be present with another person, to integrate desire with values, to choose your partner again rather than just responding to stimulus.
With compulsive pornography use, this braking system progressively weakens. Neurologists call this hypofrontality: a reduction in the prefrontal cortex’s functional capacity that results from repeatedly routing behavior through the reward pathway rather than through executive control. The trail has worn so deep that it no longer passes through the checkpoint. It goes around it.
A 2022 systematic review of 28 neuroimaging studies documented that frequent pornography use is associated with measurable decreases in gray matter in the prefrontal cortex — the tissue essential for self-regulation and impulse control. The same review found heightened activation in the nucleus accumbens during pornographic stimulation: the accelerator getting louder as the brakes get progressively softer.
This is why “just deciding to stop” becomes increasingly difficult over time. It is not a measure of your seriousness or your character. The neurological system responsible for making that decision has been structurally impaired. You are not broken. But something in the brain’s architecture has shifted, and understanding that accurately is the beginning of addressing it effectively.
Is Porn’s Effect on the Brain Permanent? Recovery Changes the AnswerThis is the question I hear most often in my work with clients, and the answer matters: no, the effects are not permanent.
But here is the important clarification: recovery is not the same as abstinence. Abstinence is stopping. Recovery is actively rebuilding.
Return to the wilderness analogy for a moment. Placing an obstacle at the entrance to the old trail helps — the foot traffic slows, and the undergrowth begins to reclaim it. Research supports this directly. A 2022 review of longitudinal neuroimaging studies found that structural and functional brain recovery occurs with sustained abstinence and treatment, with documented improvements particularly in the prefrontal cortical regions that were most affected by compulsive use. The braking system can be rebuilt.
But the deeper work in recovery is not just letting the old trail grow over. It is walking a new one.
The same principle that created the problem — neurons that fire together wire together — works in new directions as well. When you consistently choose differently, invest in genuine relational connection, develop new patterns for managing stress and emotion, and engage in the work of therapy, you are not simply avoiding an old pathway. You are laying down a new one. This is what porn addiction counseling is actually designed to do: not just interrupt the behavior, but redirect the neurology underneath it.
In my clinical experience, the clients who make the most lasting progress are not the ones who simply stopped. They are the ones who replaced. They built something: accountability structures, honest relationships, the slow and sometimes unglamorous work of rewiring through repeated choices made in the right direction. For those who want to explore the neuroscience of this process in more depth, Gary Wilson’s work at YourBrainOnPorn.com provides an extensive, research-grounded look at how the brain changes with recovery.
The brain that learned one set of patterns can learn another. That is not wishful thinking. That is neuroplasticity.
A Self-Reflection Checklist: Is My Behavior Compulsive?The following questions are not a clinical diagnosis. They are a thinking tool — a way to bring honest clarity to a pattern that is easy to minimize. Consider them carefully.
- Do you find yourself using pornography more frequently, or for longer, than you intended?
- Have you tried to cut back and found it harder than expected?
- Do you notice a declining response — needing more intense or novel content to feel the same effect?
- Is your use affecting your relationship with your partner, your sense of self, or your sexual functioning with a real person?
- Do you feel distracted, preoccupied, or pulled toward pornography at times when you genuinely don’t want to be?
- Do you find that pornography use affects your mood during or after viewing in ways that concern you?
If several of these resonate, that is worth taking seriously. It does not mean something is fundamentally wrong with you. It may mean the trail in your brain has gotten deeper than you realized — and that recovery, not just willpower, is the appropriate response. Understanding how long recovery actually takes can help set realistic expectations as you start to think about next steps.
The Bottom LineWhether you are here because pornography use conflicts with your values, or because you have noticed the behavior is running you in ways you didn’t choose — the neuroscience is the same. The brain does not change its wiring based on your motivation for wanting it to change. What matters is that you’ve noticed, and you’re taking it seriously.
Your brain was designed for the powerful reward of genuine intimacy and connection. The reward system that pornography hijacks exists for exactly those things. That means the capacity for something better is not absent. It is being redirected. And the research is clear: with real recovery — not just stopping, but actively building — the brain responds.
The wilderness doesn’t stay worn forever. Not if you stop walking the old trail and start walking a new one. That work is genuinely possible, and you do not have to do it alone. If you want to understand more about the shame cycle that often runs alongside this, this article on how shame perpetuates addiction is a useful companion read.
Frequently Asked QuestionsCan porn actually change your brain?Yes. Neuroimaging research has documented measurable changes in brain structure and function associated with compulsive pornography use, including reduced gray matter in the prefrontal cortex and altered dopamine system activity. These changes are consistent with patterns seen in other behavioral addictions and result from the brain’s reward pathway responding to repeated hyper-stimulation beyond what it was designed to handle.
Is the brain damage from pornography permanent?No. Research on neuroplasticity and addiction recovery shows that structural and functional brain improvements occur with sustained abstinence and active treatment. The prefrontal cortex, which is most affected, shows documented recovery in longitudinal neuroimaging studies. Recovery requires more than stopping — it involves actively building new patterns — but the brain’s capacity to change is real and well-supported by the research.
Is porn addiction real?The neuroscience supports compulsive pornography use as a clinically meaningful pattern with brain changes consistent with behavioral addiction. The World Health Organization’s ICD-11 recognizes Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder as a legitimate clinical condition. Whether you call it addiction, compulsive behavior, or problematic use, the neurological mechanisms and their real-world impacts are documented across dozens of studies.
How much dopamine does pornography release compared to sex?Pornography activates the mesolimbic dopamine pathway at an intensity significantly beyond what natural rewards typically produce. In a committed relationship, sexual intimacy triggers a calibrated, sustainable dopamine response. Pornography’s constant novelty and hyper-stimulation push the system well past its designed range, which is why tolerance and escalation develop over time — the brain requires increasingly intense stimulation to achieve the same response.
Can I recover from pornography use without therapy?Some people make meaningful progress through strong accountability structures, community support, and deliberate lifestyle changes. However, working with a therapist experienced in sexual compulsivity — particularly one who is CSAT-certified — addresses the underlying patterns driving the behavior and makes recovery more targeted and sustainable. The neurological changes involved respond to active rewiring, not just abstinence, and a trained clinician can help structure that process effectively.
If what you’ve read here is resonating, a free consultation is a good place to start. Our work at Therapevo is built around the neuroscience of recovery — not just helping people stop, but helping them rebuild. Book a free consultation and we can talk about what that looks like for you.
Every time you fly, a flight attendant gives the same instruction: put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others. Not because your life matters more. Because a person who has passed out from lack of oxygen cannot help anyone.
https://youtu.be/dI96DuqwXbg
You have been holding your breath for a long time.
If you’ve been living in the wake of a pornography addiction, there’s a good chance you’ve been managing, monitoring, absorbing, and waiting — all while running low on the thing you need most: your own sense of safety, dignity, and emotional ground. Boundaries are how you put the mask on. And this article is the practical guide for how to do that.
But first, a definition. Because the word “boundary” gets used in ways that create as much confusion as clarity.
What Is a Boundary (and What Isn’t)A boundary is not a threat. It is not a punishment. It is not an attempt to control what another person does.
Here is how we explain it to clients, and we use this language consistently: a boundary is the loving terms on which I am willing to engage with you.
Read that again slowly. Loving. Terms. Engagement.
It is loving because it comes from a place of genuine care — for yourself, and for the relationship. It is terms because it describes the conditions under which you can show up with your whole self, rather than a hollowed-out, braced version of yourself. And it is about engagement because it governs how you participate in this relationship, not how he must behave.
This is fundamentally different from a rule, and the difference matters. A rule is an attempt to control another person’s behavior: “You are not allowed to have your phone in the bathroom.” A boundary is a plan for your own safety and participation: “If there is a breach of digital transparency, I will spend the weekend at my sister’s to protect my peace.” One is about him. The other is about you.
It’s also different from an ultimatum, and we want to say something about why we’re careful with those. Ultimatums typically place the consequences on the person delivering them: “If you don’t stop, I will leave.” That kind of statement is very difficult to enforce, and when it isn’t enforced, it erodes your own credibility with yourself. It also doesn’t work the way people hope. Behavioral compliance — him stopping because you threatened to leave — is not recovery. It is performance. Real recovery comes from an internal shift in him, not from external pressure. We’ve covered the fuller picture of what boundaries are and aren’t in an earlier episode if you want more on this distinction.
The goal of a boundary is not to change him. It is to protect your ability to stay present, grounded, and whole — regardless of what he does.
Does Setting Boundaries Help a Porn Addict Recover?This is a fair question, and the honest answer is: often yes, but not in the way most people expect.
The mechanism isn’t that the boundary forces him to change. It’s that when you stop absorbing the consequences of his choices, those consequences start landing where they belong — with him.
This is the core insight behind the CRAFT model (Community Reinforcement and Family Training), developed by Dr. Robert J. Meyers. Research on CRAFT consistently shows that when partners disengage from the enabling and absorbing patterns that inadvertently protect an addict from his own consequences, the rate of the addict seeking treatment increases significantly — around 64-74% in clinical studies, compared to traditional confrontation and intervention approaches.
What CRAFT describes as a “relational vacuum” is worth understanding. When a partner is managing, monitoring, nagging, pleading, and policing, the addict exists inside a relational system that has organized itself around his dysfunction. Her anxiety, her emotional labor, her constant engagement with the problem — all of it provides a kind of relational cushion that keeps him from feeling the full weight of what his behavior is doing. When she sets firm boundaries and begins genuinely investing in her own life and recovery, that cushion is removed. The weight lands. The vacuum that forms in the space where her absorbing used to be is one of the most powerful motivators for an addict to seek genuine help.
None of this is guaranteed. Boundaries are worth setting for your own sake regardless of whether they move him. But it is worth knowing that the research supports what feels counterintuitive: pulling back from managing him, and investing in protecting yourself, is often more effective at creating the conditions for change than anything you could say or threaten.
What Are Examples of Healthy Boundaries for Porn Addiction?The most important feature of a well-formed boundary is that it describes what you will do — not what he must do. It is written in the first person. It is specific and observable. And rather than locking you into a single fixed consequence, it articulates a range of options available to you, so that you’re not forced to either follow through on something extreme or back down entirely.
Here is what that looks like in practice:
On digital transparency:
“If there is a breach of our agreed-upon digital transparency — cleared history, disabled accountability software, undisclosed devices — I will withdraw from intimate conversation for at least 24 hours to emotionally reorient. I may also reach out to my support person during that time.”
On active recovery participation:
“While you are not actively participating in a recovery program — meeting with a therapist, attending a group, or working with an accountability partner — I am not able to engage in planning our shared future, including financial decisions, vacations, or long-term commitments.”
On pornography use:
“If you choose to use pornography again, I will consider my options, which may include: asking you to move to the guest room, asking you to move out of the home temporarily, or other steps to be determined by me based on the circumstances. The duration and shape of my response will be my decision, based on what I need at that time.”
Notice what that last example does. It doesn’t say “if you use porn again, I will leave.” It says: I have options. I will use my judgment. You will feel the natural weight of your choice, and I will decide — from a grounded place — what I need in response. You are not locked into a single consequence, and you are not making a promise you may not be ready to keep.
On emotional safety in conversation:
“If conversations about the addiction become circular, escalate to blame or minimization, or leave me feeling more destabilized than I started, I will end the conversation and return to it at a later time, with support present if needed.”
On shared healing work:
“While couples counselling is not part of our recovery plan, I will not be able to discuss reconciliation or deepened commitment in this relationship. My willingness to work on us depends on both of us actively working on ourselves.”
5 Steps to Setting Your First BoundaryThis framework draws on principles used in CSAT (Certified Sex Addiction Therapist) training and in CRAFT-informed partner recovery work. It is designed to help you move from the idea of a boundary to an actual one you can hold.
- Get grounded first. You cannot set a durable boundary from an activated, triggered state. The boundary that comes out of the middle of an argument, or from the peak of anxiety at 2am, is likely to be either too extreme to hold or too vague to mean anything. Before you set a boundary, give yourself time to access your grounded self: the quieter, more settled internal state that has access to your actual values and needs, rather than just your current pain. Breathwork, sleep, a conversation with a trusted support person, or time with a therapist can all help you get there.
- Identify what you actually need. Ask yourself: what does emotional safety require for me to stay genuinely present in this relationship right now? Not what you want him to do — what do you need in order to function, to sleep, to parent, to maintain your dignity? Connect that need to a core value. “I need to know he is actively in recovery” connects to the value of honesty and real investment. “I need not to be gaslit when I ask direct questions” connects to the value of reality and respect. A boundary rooted in your values is far more durable than one rooted only in fear.
- Distinguish the boundary from a rule. Run your draft through this filter: does it tell him what he must do, or does it describe what you will do? “You must attend therapy every week” is a rule. “While therapy is not part of your recovery, I will not be able to discuss the long-term future of this relationship” is a boundary. That shift matters practically, because you can only control and enforce what belongs to you.
- Build in options, not just one consequence. Rather than locking yourself into a single predetermined response, articulate a range. “If X happens, I will consider the following options: A, B, or C, with the specifics determined by me based on what I need at that time.” This is not vagueness — it is honesty about the fact that context matters and that you will respond to what is actually happening, not to a script written in a moment that may not reflect your circumstances when the boundary is tested. It also prevents the common trap of stating a consequence you can’t enforce, backing down when tested, and losing ground with yourself.
- Communicate it clearly and prepare to hold it. Setting a boundary out loud, especially for the first time, often feels shaky. Your voice may not be steady. You may have practiced the words and still find them harder to say than to think. That’s normal. The shaky voice of setting a boundary is not a sign that you’re doing it wrong — it’s a sign that you’re doing something that matters to your future self. After you set it, the work is holding it. Every time you follow through on what you said you would do, you build something in yourself: the knowledge that your words mean something, and that you can be counted on — by yourself.
What to Expect When You Set ItWe want to be honest with you about what you might encounter.
Sometimes, a partner who is genuinely in a humble and committed place in his recovery will receive a boundary with openness. He may thank you for being clear. He may express relief that you’ve named what you need. That does happen.
Other times, there will be resistance. Pushback. Accusations that you’re being controlling, punitive, or unfair. This is painful to receive, especially when you’ve worked hard to set the boundary from a caring, grounded place. But consider this: a person who is genuinely committed to recovery, who understands what his addiction has cost you, and who is doing real work on himself, generally does not respond to his partner’s self-protective boundaries with anger. Resistance, in our clinical experience, is often information about where he actually is in his recovery. It is not a sign that you set the boundary wrong.
The fear of not being able to hold it — of setting the boundary and then backing down when tested, and therefore appearing weak — is one of the most common concerns we hear. Here is what we say to that: start with a boundary you are genuinely prepared to follow through on. You do not have to set your most consequential boundary first. Start where you can hold the line. Build the evidence, for yourself, that you are capable of it. And get support. Holding a boundary alone, without a therapist or a community of peers who understand, is much harder than it needs to be.
When a Boundary Gets Crossed: What to Do NextAssume your boundary will be tested. Not because you set it wrong, and not because he’s necessarily a bad person, but because testing is what happens. Addicts in early or unstable recovery push against limits. A boundary that has never been tested hasn’t proven anything yet — for either of you.
Here is a practical sequence for when it happens.
Go back to what you wrote. This is why writing the boundary down matters. In the moment a boundary is crossed, you will be activated. Your nervous system will be doing what it was trained to do: spike, scan, react. That is not the state from which to make consequential decisions. Your written boundary, drafted from a calmer and more grounded place, is the document you return to. Not his version of what you agreed to. Yours.
Give yourself time before you respond. You do not have to respond in the room, in the moment, or in the same conversation where the breach occurred. “I need some time before I respond to this” is a complete and legitimate sentence. Taking time to settle into your grounded self and review your options is not weakness. It is the difference between a response you can be steady about and a reaction you may need to walk back.
Consider your options. This is where the range-of-responses approach pays off. You don’t have to choose the most extreme consequence because a boundary was crossed. You choose the response that fits the nature and severity of this particular breach, from the list of options you prepared. Was this a minor drift or a significant relapse? A first breach or a repeated pattern? Your response can be calibrated accordingly, and it remains yours to determine.
Communicate simply and without negotiation. When you’re ready, inform him of what you’re going to do. Not a lengthy explanation. Not an invitation to debate. Something like: “I told you that if this happened, I would consider my options. I’ve done that. Here’s what I’m going to do.” Clear. Grounded. Not cruel, and not open for renegotiation.
What you will likely encounter at this point is an attempt to talk you out of it — an explanation, a promise, an appeal to your love for him or your fear of what the consequence means for the relationship. This is where the written document matters most. You are not responding to the person in front of you in this moment of activation. You are following through on a decision you made when you were calm, clear, and connected to your own values. Those two things are not the same.
What if you genuinely can’t follow through? Be honest with yourself about it. Either the stated consequence needs to be recalibrated to something you can actually hold right now, or you need more support to hold the line. Both of those are workable. What doesn’t work is pretending you can enforce something you can’t, then backing down, and losing trust in your own word. It is far better to set a smaller boundary you can hold completely than a large one you abandon when tested.
Every time you follow through on what you said you would do, you build something that no one can take from you: the knowledge that your words mean something, and that you are someone who can be counted on — by yourself.
Common Questions About Boundaries in Porn Addiction RecoveryHow do I set a boundary without it turning into a fight?Deliver it in a calm moment, not in the middle of a conflict. Use first-person framing: what you need, what you will do. Avoid lengthy justifications or debates — you don’t need his agreement for the boundary to be valid, only his awareness of it. State it clearly, acknowledge that it may be difficult to hear, and give him space to respond without immediately defending. A therapist trained in betrayal trauma and partner recovery can help you prepare for and navigate the conversation.
What if I set a boundary and he ignores it?Then you follow through on what you said you would do, using your range-of-options approach. Every time you follow through, the boundary becomes more real — for both of you. If following through feels impossible, it’s worth examining whether the stated consequence needs to be recalibrated to something you can actually hold, or whether additional support would help you get there.
How is a boundary different from enabling?Enabling is absorbing, buffering, or excusing the consequences of his behavior. A boundary is the opposite: it removes the buffer and allows consequences to land. Setting and holding a boundary is one of the most direct ways to stop enabling a porn addict’s behavior — because it stops organizing your life around managing his.
What if I’m afraid he’ll leave if I set boundaries?This fear is real and common. Here is a reframe worth sitting with: a person who leaves because you set loving, reasonable terms for your own participation in the relationship is telling you something important about his commitment to recovery and to you. Boundaries reveal what’s actually there. And a relationship that can only survive your silence and your suffering is not the relationship you deserve to be protecting.
You Deserve to BreatheSetting boundaries in the middle of betrayal trauma is not a one-time event. It is ongoing work that requires support, repetition, and the willingness to hold the line even when it would be easier to let it go.
If this work feels lonely, that’s because it often is — especially without the right people around you. Our therapists specialize in betrayal trauma and in helping partners build the kind of practical, values-based safety plan that actually holds. Whether you are just beginning to name what you need or you have been trying to hold limits alone for years, we can help you build your blueprint.
We offer a free 20-minute consultation to help you find the right fit. Reach out to our team whenever you’re ready. You deserve to breathe again.
Two things can be true at once. He is a good man, and he has been lying to you for years. He is a devoted father, and he has been carrying a secret that has shaped your intimacy, your self-image, and your sense of reality. He is the person you chose, and he has caused you real harm.
https://youtu.be/QzKfkXREilI
If you’ve chosen to stay, or if you’re still trying to decide, you’re not living in denial. You’re living inside a complexity that most people outside your situation won’t fully understand. And you deserve a recovery strategy built for exactly where you are.
Is It Okay to Stay With a Husband Who Has a Porn Addiction?Yes. With clarity, not just hope.
That’s the most important thing we want to say upfront. Staying is not weakness. It is not codependency by definition. It is not automatically a mistake. Staying can be the considered, courageous decision of a person who loves someone and is willing to do the work — provided that “the work” includes her work, not only his.
But “staying and waiting” and “staying and recovering” are not the same thing. The first is passive, exhausting, and ultimately corrosive to the person doing the waiting. The second is active, anchored in your own values and your own boundaries, and it gives both of you the best possible chance — whether the relationship ultimately survives or not.
The distinction between those two ways of staying is what this article is about.
The “Good Man” Split: How to Hold Two Truths at OnceSomething we hear often from partners in this situation: “If he were a monster, this would be easier.”
But he’s not a monster. He’s the man who makes you laugh, who shows up for your kids, who remembers your coffee order and apologizes when he’s wrong. He has genuinely good parts: loving, present, admirable parts. And he has another part, a hidden, compartmentalized part that was acting out, lying, and protecting the addiction at your expense. Both of these things are true. That’s exactly why it’s so disorienting.
One thing that helps clients hold this is learning to use the word “and” instead of “but.” Not “he’s a good man, but he did this to me,” as though one truth cancels the other. He’s a good man, and he did this to me. Both real. Not in conflict.
We sometimes use parts language in therapy for exactly this: the lovable, devoted, good parts of him coexisted with an addict part that was partitioned away from the rest of his life. This is one of the features of addiction — the ability to compartmentalize the secret life so thoroughly that even the person living it learns not to connect the pieces. It doesn’t excuse what he did. But it does explain how a fundamentally decent person can sustain a secret for years. We’ve covered compartmentalization in depth in a recent episode — it’s worth watching if you want to understand the mechanism.
Here’s what we want to be careful about: the “good” can become a reason not to fully reckon with the harm. We see partners who cycle back to “but he’s such a good man” every time they get close to naming how deeply they’ve been hurt. This is understandable. It’s also a form of emotional bypass, using the positive to avoid the full weight of the negative. We want you to hold the whole picture. His good parts, and the real impact of his addict part. Both, without using one to silence the other.
The Shame of Staying (and Why It Doesn’t Belong to You)There is a particular kind of isolation that comes with choosing to stay. It’s one thing to carry the weight of his secret. It’s another to carry the weight of people who don’t understand your decision, or don’t respect it.
Maybe someone in your life has told you, plainly or implicitly, that staying makes you weak. Or naive. Or a doormat. Maybe you’ve read comments on online forums, or talked to a friend who left her own difficult marriage, and heard: “A strong woman would leave.”
We want to say something back to that directly: sometimes it takes more courage to stay than to leave. Leaving is clear. It has a script. People know how to respond to it. Staying thoughtfully, with open eyes, inside all the complexity, is harder to explain and harder to hold. It doesn’t fit the narrative, and that can leave you isolated in a way that adds another layer to an already heavy situation.
Here’s something else worth noticing: the people who most urgently tell you to leave are sometimes speaking from their own experience. Their advice may reflect what they would do, or have done, more than what is right for you. That doesn’t mean their care for you isn’t real. It means their counsel may not fit your situation.
The people in your inner circle right now should be people who will support you regardless of what you decide: to stay, to leave, or to stay undecided while you figure things out. Those who can’t offer that kind of support may need to be held at some distance while you do this work. You can come back to those relationships later. Right now, your energy needs to go toward healing, not toward managing other people’s reactions to your choices.
Your decision about your relationship belongs to you. It doesn’t belong to your sister, your best friend, or an internet forum.
Dating vs. Marriage: The Decision Doesn’t Weigh the SameWe work with partners across the full spectrum of relationship length and legal status: people who’ve been dating six months, people in long-term common-law relationships, people twenty-five years into a marriage.
For those earlier in a relationship, the practical exit is simpler in some ways. There are no shared assets to divide, no custody schedule to negotiate, no decades of intertwined history to unpack. We want to be honest about that. At the same time, we want to name something that doesn’t always get said: the emotional cost is real regardless of timeline. If you’ve invested two or three years, or even one, into a person and a future you were building toward, the pain of that interrupted dream is genuine. It deserves to be treated as such, not minimized because you weren’t married.
There is also the sunk cost pull worth examining: the sense that having already invested a significant stretch of your life, you can’t afford to lose what you’ve put in. That pull is real, and it can keep people in situations longer than is healthy. It’s worth looking at honestly, ideally with support.
We want to mention briefly, and gently, that some of the pull to stay in earlier relationships can come from a specific kind of bond that forms in high-stress, high-intimacy situations involving betrayal. We’ve covered trauma bonding in a recent episode, and if that concept resonates with where you are, it’s worth exploring further. The bond you feel can be real and still be shaped by trauma in ways that aren’t entirely serving you.
For those in long-term marriages, the layers are different. There are practical realities: shared finances, children, decades of history built together. There is the sheer weight of all those years. Ending a marriage of twenty or thirty years is, quite simply, one of the more heart-rending things a human being can face, and “just leave” is not a simple answer. Staying in a long marriage is a valid path. It requires something more specific than hope, though. It requires a plan for your own recovery, your own boundaries, and your own sanity, regardless of where his recovery lands.
What Is the CRAFT Approach for Porn Addiction Partners?Most of the conventional advice available to partners of addicts comes down to three options: wait and see, issue an ultimatum, or leave. What’s largely missing is a fourth path that is research-backed, empowering, and built specifically for people who love someone with an addiction and don’t know what to do with that love.
That path draws on CRAFT: Community Reinforcement and Family Training. The name is worth unpacking, because it tells you something about the approach.
“Community Reinforcement” comes from a behavioral framework called Community Reinforcement Approach (CRA), developed originally for substance addiction treatment. The underlying premise is that addiction thrives when it offers the most accessible source of reward and relief in a person’s life. CRA works by systematically building up the competing rewards in that person’s community: healthy relationships, meaningful work, enjoyable activities, physical wellbeing. When those competing sources of reward become genuinely available and satisfying, the addiction has more to compete against. The “community” around the addict, including his partner and family, is treated as a powerful therapeutic resource, not just a victim of his behavior.
“Family Training” is the partner-facing component. It provides practical skills for how to communicate with an addicted loved one from a grounded rather than reactive place, how to allow natural consequences to occur without interfering, how to positively reinforce recovery-oriented behavior when it appears, and how to invest in your own life and wellbeing as a central part of the process.
CRAFT was developed by Dr. Robert J. Meyers at the University of New Mexico. Research on the approach, including studies published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, found that it helped engage the addicted family member in treatment in approximately 64-74% of cases, compared to roughly 13% for Al-Anon-style approaches and 30% for traditional intervention models. Dr. Meyers’ book Get Your Loved One Sober is the most accessible guide to the approach for family members and partners.
The central shift CRAFT teaches is from passive recovery to active recovery. And that distinction is worth sitting with.
Passive Recovery vs. Active Recovery: What’s the Difference?Passive recovery is what most partners fall into by default. It’s not a conscious choice. It’s what happens when the addiction takes over the center of the relationship and your life begins to organize itself around monitoring it.
Consider a woman we’ll call Rachel. Her husband is attending meetings, seeing a therapist, engaging with a workbook. And Rachel is watching. Every time he’s on his phone, she notices how long. Every evening she scans his mood for signs of evasion. She lies awake running calculations: are the good days outnumbering the bad? Is the shame in his eyes real remorse or performance? Her entire internal life has become a monitoring system for his recovery.
Rachel is exhausted. She is also no more secure than she was six months ago. Because her sense of safety depends entirely on what he does, and she cannot control what he does. The watching is not working. The longer she stays in this mode, the more disempowered, anxious, and hollowed out she becomes.
Active recovery starts with a different question: what do I actually have control over? And it channels energy there.
Rachel’s version of active recovery might look like this. She finds a therapist who specializes in betrayal trauma, separate from the couples work. She joins a group of other partners navigating the same situation, not just to vent, but to learn and to feel less alone. She starts running again, something she gave up when the crisis began. She gets clear, for herself first and then with her husband, on what she actually needs from his recovery in order to feel safe enough to stay, and what would be a dealbreaker. She stops checking his phone at night because she made a recovery boundary for herself: nothing after 10pm.
None of this fixes her husband. All of it changes the relational system. But something else can happen too, and it’s worth understanding the psychological mechanisms behind it.
What May Be Happening in Him When She Makes These ChangesWe want to offer this carefully, because active recovery is worth doing regardless of whether it changes his behavior, and no approach works for everyone. But for many couples, here is what the research and clinical experience suggests can happen on his end when a partner genuinely invests in her own recovery.
Natural consequences become real. While Rachel was organized around managing his recovery, absorbing his emotional fallout, and buffering the relational damage, the consequences of his behavior were being filtered through her anxiety and management. When she stops doing that work, the full weight of his choices starts landing without a cushion. This isn’t punishment. It’s the removal of a buffer that was inadvertently keeping consequences from registering with their full weight. For many addicts, this is one of the things that shifts the internal calculation.
Cognitive dissonance intensifies. Many addicts sustain their denial partly by reading the relative stability of the relationship: she’s upset, but we’re managing, things are basically okay. When a partner begins visibly building her own life, pursuing her own health, and organizing herself less around him, the gap between his self-image (good husband, man who is handling things) and the visible reality grows harder to bridge. Cognitive dissonance at that level tends to push people toward resolution. For some, that resolution comes through genuine engagement with their own recovery. For others, it comes through escalating denial. You cannot control which direction it goes. But the dissonance is real, and research consistently identifies it as a precursor to behavior change.
The relational system loses its equilibrium. Family systems theory describes how relational systems develop a stable pattern, even dysfunctional ones. The system that includes an addict and an anxiously monitoring partner is a stable (if miserable) system — each person’s behavior reinforces the other’s, and the system holds its shape. When Rachel changes her role within that system, the equilibrium breaks down. Her husband’s previous coping strategies, which included relying on her emotional labor, her management, her vigilance as a kind of regulatory backdrop, no longer function the way they did. The system has to reorganize. That reorganization, while painful, is where change becomes possible.
Her wellbeing becomes a non-shaming mirror. There’s an important distinction between shame-based pressure (“Look at the damage you’ve caused”) and contrast-based clarity (“I am building something real; the distance between my health and your struggle is becoming visible to both of us”). Shame tends to push addicts deeper into the cycle. Contrast-based clarity, particularly when a partner’s wellbeing is genuine and not performed, creates a different kind of motivational pressure. When she is well because she has done the work, and he can see it, the narrative that everything is basically fine becomes very difficult to sustain.
Again: none of this is guaranteed, and Rachel’s recovery is worth pursuing for her own sake first. But these are real mechanisms, and understanding them can help a partner invest in her own healing without feeling like she’s abandoning the relationship. She isn’t. She’s changing it, in the way that change actually happens.
Your Personal Recovery ChecklistThis isn’t a prescription — it’s a starting inventory. Treat it as a list of areas to build into, one at a time, at whatever pace is realistic.
- Find a therapist who specializes in betrayal trauma. Not just couples therapy, and not just a general therapist. Your healing has its own track. Betrayal trauma therapy addresses the specific injury of relational deception, and it works differently from standard grief or anxiety treatment.
- Join a support group. S-Anon, COSA, or an online community of partners navigating porn addiction. Being in a space with people who understand what you mean when you describe the knot in your stomach is not nothing.
- Identify your non-negotiables. What does his recovery need to include for you to feel safe enough to stay? Write it down. Be specific. This is not an ultimatum. It is clarity about your own needs.
- Reclaim one thing that belongs only to you. A hobby, a friendship, a practice, a weekly hour that has nothing to do with the addiction or the recovery.
- Set a sleep boundary and hold it. Not checking his phone after a certain hour is a recovery practice. Your nervous system needs consistent rest, and it won’t get it if you’re on alert all night.
- Attend to your physical health. The chronic stress of betrayal trauma has real physiological effects: disrupted sleep, autoimmune symptoms, chronic tension. If you’ve been ignoring these, now is the time to take them seriously.
- Audit your support circle. Who can hold your complexity without an agenda? Spend more time with those people. Hold others at a little more distance for now.
- Tend to your spiritual life, if that’s part of who you are. This kind of crisis tends to either deepen or fracture a person’s faith, and it’s worth attending to that rather than pushing it aside until things resolve.
Common Questions About Partner Recovery in Porn AddictionHow do I stop enabling my husband’s porn addiction?The most effective answer isn’t about policing him more carefully — it’s about investing in your own life and recovery more seriously. When you stop organizing your emotional world around his behavior and stop absorbing the consequences that belong to him, the natural weight of those consequences becomes more present and more real. This is the core principle behind the CRAFT model, and it’s the difference between passive and active recovery.
What does staying after betrayal actually look like in practice?It looks like doing your own healing work regardless of where he is in his. It looks like identifying clear conditions for staying and holding them, not as leverage but as honesty. It looks like building a life that doesn’t wait for him to get better before it begins. Betrayal trauma support through individual therapy, group community, and structured self-care is where most partners who do this well start.
Can couples recover from pornography addiction together?Yes, and the couples who make it generally do so because both people are working their own recovery tracks simultaneously. His track is addiction recovery. Hers is betrayal trauma healing. The couple’s work comes third, and it works best when both individual tracks have enough traction to build on. Couples counselling for pornography addiction is different from general relationship therapy — the addiction context matters, and it’s important to work with someone who understands it.
You Don’t Have to Figure This Out AloneChoosing to stay is not choosing the easy path. It is choosing a specific, difficult, courageous path that requires its own recovery — one that doesn’t wait for him to get better before it begins.
If you’re in this place, our team works with partners at every stage of this process: early discovery, years into the uncertainty, and everywhere in between. We can help you build the clarity, the boundaries, and the internal stability that make this kind of staying possible.
We offer a free 20-minute consultation to help you find the right fit. Reach out to our team whenever you’re ready.
You know what you saw on his phone. You confronted him about it. But by the end of the conversation you were the one confused and wondering why you needed to apologize. That’s not a failure of memory. There is a name for what just happened to you.
https://youtu.be/t0Mq3HlBu7c
Gaslighting in porn addiction is a pattern of psychological tactics used — sometimes deliberately, sometimes without full awareness — to protect an active addiction by making the partner doubt her own perceptions, memory, and judgment. It sounds like: “That’s not what happened.” “You’re overreacting.” “I can’t believe you don’t trust me.” And it works, for a while, because the person saying it is someone you loved and believed, and because doubt is easier to live with than the thing you’re afraid is true.
If you’ve been told you’re paranoid, oversensitive, or “too focused on this,” this article is for you. Your gut is not broken. It’s been trained to detect something real. And learning to trust it again — not his confession, not the evidence on his phone, but your own grounded inner knowing — is not a side task in your recovery. It is the work.
What Are Common Signs of Gaslighting in Porn Addiction?Gaslighting in the context of porn addiction usually follows a recognizable pattern. When confronted, he denies. When you push back, he turns it around. And by the end of the conversation, you’re somehow the one apologizing — for snooping, for not trusting him, for bringing it up again, for making him feel accused when he’s “trying so hard.”
Researchers and clinicians who study relational abuse call this dynamic DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. It was first named by psychologist Dr. Jennifer Freyd, and while it’s often associated with abusive relationships, it appears commonly in addiction contexts too — including in relationships where the person is not fundamentally abusive but is protecting a habit they’re not ready to give up.
Common signs of gaslighting in porn addiction include:
- He contradicts what you clearly saw, heard, or found, insisting your memory is wrong
- Your emotional reaction becomes the central problem, not what caused it
- He accuses you of being controlling, paranoid, or mentally unstable when you raise concerns
- He gives explanations that technically make sense but leave the knot in your stomach untouched
- You leave conversations feeling confused about what’s real, even when you walked in feeling certain
- Over time, you start fact-checking your own memories before you speak
The Gaslighting Script vs. The TruthThese are the specific lines we hear most often from partners describing what they were told. You may recognize some of them.
| What He Said | What’s Actually True | | --- | --- | | “It was just a pop-up. Malware. I didn’t click anything.” | Unsolicited pop-ups don’t generate saved browsing histories, repeated site visits, or subscription charges. The technical claim almost never holds up to basic scrutiny, which is why it’s paired with pressure not to scrutinize. | | “You’re being old-fashioned. Every man watches porn — this is completely normal.” | Frequency and type of use matter clinically. So does secrecy, and so does impact on the relationship. “Everyone does it” is a minimizing tactic that deflects from the specific behaviour and its specific effects on you. | | “If you were more available / adventurous / interested in sex, I wouldn’t need this.” | Pornography use precedes and causes decreased partner desire in many cases, not the reverse. Placing responsibility for his behaviour on your adequacy is one of the most damaging scripts in the DARVO playbook, and it has no clinical basis. | | “You’re imagining things. You have a terrible memory. You’re losing it.” | Directly attacking the reliability of your perception is a defining feature of gaslighting. If you’re being told, consistently, that your observations are wrong and your memory is faulty, pay attention to that pattern — not just the individual incidents. |
Why Does Gaslighting Feel Like Physical Pain?Because it is. Or at least, the body experiences it as a physical event, not just a cognitive one.
You may know this feeling already. There’s a sudden coldness in your chest mid-conversation, before your mind has finished processing what he just said. A buzzing in your ears when the explanation starts — the one that’s technically plausible and somehow still wrong. The sinking knot that settles in your stomach after a confrontation where he turned it all back on you, and you’re left holding the weight of both his denial and your own doubt.
This is your nervous system detecting what researchers call a breach in the relational field. Long before your conscious mind has caught up, your body has already registered the mismatch: what he’s telling you and what your accumulated experience of him is telling you don’t match. The body is faster than cognition. It knows first.
The problem is that after months or years of being told your perceptions are wrong, many partners stop trusting those physical signals. They learn to override the coldness in the chest. They explain away the knot. They defer to his verbal account over their own physiological data. And the result is a deep, disorienting kind of cognitive dissonance in the relationship — holding two realities at once, neither of which you can fully commit to.
This is not a character flaw. It’s what chronic gaslighting does to a nervous system that has been taught to distrust itself.
Gaslighting, Addiction, and Abuse: Understanding the DifferenceWe want to be careful here, because this matters.
Gaslighting and DARVO tactics are well-documented in abusive relationships. But they also appear regularly in addiction — in men who are not abusers, who do not intend to harm, and who would be genuinely horrified if they understood the full effect of what they were doing. The presence of these tactics in your relationship does not automatically mean you are in an abusive relationship. And it also doesn’t mean you’re not. You may not know for some time.
Here’s what we do know clinically: when an addict moves into genuine, well-established sobriety and recovery, the gaslighting and deflecting tend to fade. The tactics existed to protect the addiction. When the addiction is no longer being protected, the need for the tactics diminishes. This is one of the things to watch for as recovery unfolds — not just whether the acting out stops, but whether the hiding strategies stop too.
There’s also an important distinction in how the gaslighting operates in the first place. For some men, it’s deliberate: a calculated choice to protect access to the addiction at the partner’s expense. For others — often men who grew up in households where the truth wasn’t safe to tell — the denial and deflection are almost reflexive. They learned early that honesty cost too much, and the pattern became automatic. That doesn’t make it less damaging. But it does mean that for those men, getting completely honest requires more than willingness. It requires rewiring a lifelong survival response. Therapy helps. It takes work.
What we hope to see — and what we help couples work toward in recovery-focused therapy — is a specific kind of radical honesty. Not just “I stopped watching porn.” But: “Here’s what I was doing to hide it. Here’s how I deflected when you asked. Here’s the specific thing I said to make you doubt yourself.” When an addict is willing to tell on himself in that way, it sends a profound safety signal to his partner. It says: I am not protecting this anymore. Not the behaviour and not the tactics I used to cover it.
That moment, when it comes, feels different. Partners know it. The body knows it.
The Recovery Reframe: “I Know What I Know”Here is what we want to offer you, and we want to say it clearly.
The goal is not to get him to confess. The goal is not to find the evidence that will finally make him admit it. We understand why that feels like the goal — because confession seems like it would give you solid ground to stand on. But what we see in practice is that confession alone doesn’t do that. Partners who receive a full, tearful confession often tell us: “I felt relief for about a day. And then the knot was back.”
What actually creates solid ground is something different. It’s learning to distinguish between two kinds of internal responses: the activated, triggered nervous system response — racing thoughts, urgency, spiraling, the desperate need for proof right now — and the grounded, bodily sense of knowing. They feel different. The grounded response is quieter. It’s rooted in the body rather than spinning in the head. It has access to the accumulated wisdom of everything you’ve experienced and learned.
What matters, in the end, is not his confession. What matters is your grounded, bodily response to whatever he says. When you’ve developed that grounded awareness — when you’ve learned to trust the quiet signal over the activated spiral — you will know whether his words ring true or ring hollow. And you won’t need his validation to tell you.
For partners with a Christian faith, this often connects to something deeper: learning to quiet the noise of the anxious mind and listen for a steadier source of guidance. Many clients describe this as a spiritual practice as much as a psychological one, and we honour that.
Rebuilding your trust in your own intuition is not a side project. It is your primary recovery work.
What Does Stepping Out of the Gaslight Actually Look Like?Practically, it starts with recognition. Once you can name what’s happening in your body during a gaslighting interaction — the sudden coldness, the buzzing, the way the knot arrives before the thought does — you can start to treat that signal as data rather than anxiety to be suppressed.
It also means making a deliberate internal shift: his willingness to admit something no longer determines whether that thing is true. You can hold your own perception as valid while remaining open to being wrong, without needing his confirmation to proceed. Some therapists and researchers describe this as creating a different kind of relational dynamic — one where you are no longer a participant in the denial system, which often, over time, changes the relational pressure in ways that make honesty more necessary for him too.
Body-based approaches, including practices drawn from polyvagal theory and Somatic Experiencing, are particularly effective here because they work from the body up rather than the mind down. They help you locate and strengthen the grounded internal state that makes it possible to trust your own knowing — not because you’ve suppressed the anxiety, but because you’ve built something more stable underneath it.
When partners develop this, the relief is different in kind from the relief of finding proof. They describe getting off the hamster wheel. Stopping the checking. Resting. Trusting that they’ll know what they need to know when they need to know it. And in our experience: they do.
Common Questions About Gaslighting in Porn AddictionCan gaslighting in porn addiction be unintentional?Yes. Some men gaslight deliberately, as a calculated strategy to protect their access to pornography. Others do it automatically, particularly if they grew up in homes where honesty was punished or unsafe. In both cases, the impact on the partner is real and serious. Understanding the difference matters for recovery planning, but it doesn’t determine whether your experience was harmful. It was.
What do I do when I know he’s lying but can’t prove it?Start by separating two questions: What is true? And what do I need to do? You don’t always need proof to act on what you know. Getting support through betrayal trauma therapy or community resources can help you clarify your own sense of reality and make decisions from a grounded place, rather than waiting for a confession that may or may not come.
Is what I’m experiencing a form of emotional abuse in my marriage?Gaslighting can be a feature of emotional abuse, but it also appears in addiction contexts where the overall dynamic is not abusive. The presence of these tactics warrants taking your experience seriously, getting good support, and paying attention over time to whether the behaviour shifts as recovery progresses. A therapist who specializes in betrayal trauma and PTSD symptoms can help you assess your situation with clarity.
You Don’t Have to Navigate the Fog AloneWhat you’re experiencing has a name. The confusion, the second-guessing, the way you walked out of a conversation certain about something and somehow ended up apologizing — that is not a personal failing. It is what gaslighting does, and it is a recognizable, treatable injury.
Our therapists work with pornography addiction recovery and the specific betrayal trauma that partners carry through it. We can help you find your footing in your own reality again — with or without his cooperation.
We offer a free 20-minute consultation to help you find the right fit. Reach out to our team at Therapevo Counselling whenever you’re ready.
You know the ritual by now. You wait until he’s in the shower. Or maybe you’ve gotten past that stage and you just pick up his phone while he’s in the same room, watching his face as you do it. The buzz starts before you’ve even unlocked the screen. Your breathing goes shallow. There’s a knot somewhere in your chest or your stomach that doesn’t loosen, whether you find something or you don’t.
https://youtu.be/-M4eLb6FHYU
You’ve been doing this for weeks. Maybe months. Maybe longer than you want to say out loud.
If you’re searching for signs your husband is still using porn, here is what we want you to know before anything else: the checking is not the problem. It’s a signal. It’s telling you that something in you doesn’t feel safe, and that your nervous system is working overtime trying to find the ground. Whether he’s currently acting out or not, you are dealing with a real and serious injury. And the way out of the detective trap isn’t willpower. It’s understanding what the trap is actually made of.
What You’re Doing Makes Complete SenseLet’s say this clearly: checking his browser history, his bank statements, his app downloads, the storage on his phone — this is not paranoia. It’s not some character flaw. It’s a logical, predictable response to having the floor yanked out from under you.
When you discovered his pornography use, your brain received a threat signal. Something that was supposed to be safe turned out to be dangerous. And since then, your nervous system has been doing exactly what nervous systems are designed to do: scan for danger. Look for evidence. Try to figure out where the ground is.
Checking is how you’ve been trying to find the ground.
We also want to name something honestly: depending on where your husband is in his own process, the checking may be catching real things. When some men are discovered, they don’t get help — they just get more careful. The browsing goes further underground. The histories get cleared more reliably. The secrecy becomes more sophisticated, not less. If that’s your situation, your instincts are not wrong. The alarm bells are ringing because there’s still something to alarm about.
Others are in a genuinely different place. They’re white-knuckling their way through it, or they’ve gotten some real sobriety. But they make a misguided decision: they think if they can hide the difficulty of their struggle from you, they’ll spare you pain. So they minimize. They say “I’m fine, I’m working on it.” They get vague when you ask direct questions. To a partner who has already been lied to, vague reassurance and active deception feel identical. Because in a meaningful way, they are. And so your gut keeps firing, and you keep checking.
The Physical Toll of Hyper-vigilanceThere’s a reason we call it “fight or flight.” It’s a physical state, not just a mental one. And if you’ve been in detective mode for months, your body has been running a low-grade version of that physical emergency response almost without stopping.
You may recognize some of this in yourself:
- The buzzing or ringing sensation that starts the moment you pick up his phone
- Shallow chest breathing that you don’t notice until it’s been going on for an hour
- A heart rate that jumps before you’ve even opened anything
- The knot in your stomach that’s there before you’re fully awake and still there when you can’t fall asleep
- The hyperawareness of where he is, what he’s doing, and how long he’s been on his phone
What makes this particularly cruel is that the knot doesn’t go away even when you don’t find anything. Clean browser history, nothing suspicious on the credit card, no new apps. You put the phone down, and within the hour the low-level hum is back. Because you’re not just responding to evidence. You’re responding to a nervous system that has been trained to expect danger.
What this costs women over months and years is not a small thing. We see partners running on four or five hours of broken sleep, night after night. We’ve had clients whose doctors are puzzled by new autoimmune symptoms or chronic inflammatory conditions that arrived after discovery and won’t resolve. Women who have made mistakes at work, missed things with their kids, stopped doing the things that used to bring them life. The hypervigilance of betrayal trauma is a real medical and psychological event. It is not drama. It is not insecurity. It is what happens to a body that has been in red alert for too long.
Why the Gut Feeling Won’t Go AwayHere’s something we want to say that we think matters, even though it’s uncomfortable.
At some point in this process, many partners hit a wall. They’re in the middle of checking something, and they realize they genuinely can’t tell: am I reacting to a real signal, or is this a trauma response to something innocent? The knot in my stomach when I pick up his phone — is it because something is actually wrong, or is it because my body learned to brace itself and hasn’t stopped?
This is one of the most disorienting features of chronic betrayal trauma. The alarm system that was once calibrated to real danger becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from a nervous system that’s been rewired by repeated exposure to threat. You’ve been deceived. Your read on the situation has been wrong before, in both directions. And now your body’s own signals — the ones that are supposed to be trustworthy — feel like they might be unreliable too.
We’ll say something here that we think is important: we ourselves, as trained therapists, often cannot definitively answer from the outside which situation a partner is in. Is this hypervigilance tracking something real? Or is it a trauma response to an environment that’s now actually safe? Without direct clinical assessment of both people, more information, and time, the honest answer is often: we can’t tell either. You are not failing at something you should be able to figure out on your own. The uncertainty is real. And it’s a feature of this injury, not a reflection of your judgment.
This is part of why the checking tends to escalate rather than resolve. It can’t give you what you’re looking for. It can give you data. But certainty — the actual felt sense that you are safe — checking cannot provide that, regardless of what you find.
Why Finding Proof Won’t Fix ThisThis is the pivot point that almost nothing written on this topic ever reaches: finding proof gives you data, but it does not give you peace.
We say that without minimizing the value of truth. Truth matters enormously. Honesty is the only foundation real recovery can be built on. But think carefully about what you’re actually looking for when you pick up his phone at midnight. You’re not just looking for information. You’re looking for your nervous system to settle. You’re looking for the anxiety to stop. You’re looking for the ground.
Here is what we see in practice, time and again: facts don’t regulate nervous systems. Feelings do.
A partner who confirms her husband has been sober for six months doesn’t automatically feel safe. And a partner who confirms he relapsed last week doesn’t necessarily feel more anxious than she did before she looked — because some part of her already knew. The nervous system doesn’t respond to information the way a spreadsheet does. It responds to emotional experience, to felt safety, to the quality of connection and attunement in the relationship. Data feeds the mind. Healing the nervous system is a different kind of work entirely.
There’s a second thing worth saying here, specifically for partners whose husbands are still in active addiction. We have never seen evidence work as the thing that drives a pornography addict into treatment. Confronting someone with browser history, screenshots, bank statements — it may produce confession. It may produce shame. It may produce promises. But it does not produce recovery. Recovery comes from somewhere inside the addict, from a genuine reckoning with what his behaviour is costing him and a real desire to change. Your detective work can force a confrontation. It cannot create his motivation to get well. That can only come from him.
What this means is that there are really two separate questions. The first is: what is he doing? The second — and this one belongs entirely to you — is: what are you going to do regardless of what he is doing?
Moving From “How Do I Catch Him?” to “How Do I Protect My Peace?”This shift is not resignation. It is not deciding that his recovery doesn’t matter or that you’ll quietly accept whatever comes. It’s recognizing what you actually have power over and choosing to invest your energy there.
We want to say something clearly here: we know that professional support isn’t equally accessible to everyone. Some of you are reading this without insurance, or with coverage that doesn’t come close to covering the cost of ongoing therapy. Some of you are in jurisdictions where the laws around who can provide care across borders limit your options. That’s a real barrier, and we don’t want to write as though “just go to therapy” is a simple answer.
So let’s talk about what healing can look like at different levels of access.
If you can work with a therapist who specializes in betrayal trauma, that’s the most direct route to helping your nervous system begin to regulate. Not because the external situation has resolved, but because you’re building something internally that doesn’t depend entirely on what he does next. Betrayal trauma therapy done well is different from general infidelity counselling. It targets the specific injury of repeated deception by someone you were intimate with, and it works.
If that’s not accessible right now, there are real alternatives that do genuine work:
- Books like Betrayal Bond by Patrick Carnes or Your Sexually Addicted Spouse by Barbara Steffens give you a clinical framework for understanding what’s happening in your nervous system, and why it’s not a personal failing.
- Support groups — both in-person (groups like S-Anon or COSA) and online communities of betrayed partners — can provide the felt experience of not being alone in this. A room full of women who know what you mean when you describe the knot in your stomach before you open his phone is not nothing.
- Somatic and grounding practices — breathwork, body-based regulation techniques, consistent sleep and movement — are not just self-care clichés. They are direct interventions in the nervous system’s fight-or-flight loop. The body needs to learn that it’s safe, and it learns that through physical experience, not just insight.
- Podcasts and YouTube content like what we produce on this channel can help you understand the recovery process, feel less alone, and start building a new framework for what healing actually looks like.
- A good, grounded friend who can sit with you without minimizing or catastrophizing is worth more than it might sound. Co-regulation — the nervous system settling in the presence of someone calm and safe — is a real mechanism. You don’t always need a professional for it.
The goal across all of these is the same: move from a state where your internal experience is entirely contingent on what he does next, toward one where you have real tools for your own regulation. That shift doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t require you to be fine. It just requires you to start putting some resources toward your own recovery, not only toward monitoring his.
Here’s something we don’t say lightly, because it’s hard to hear. We have watched men get genuinely sober from pornography addiction, and then watched their marriages fall apart anyway. Not because he failed. Because she never got the help she needed. The betrayal trauma went untreated for years, and the damage it did to her — the hypervigilance, the erosion of trust, the way she’d learned to brace herself as a default setting — didn’t heal just because his behaviour changed. Her healing needed to be its own project, on its own timeline, with its own support.
If you’re reading this as a husband in recovery: the portrait we’ve just described is the real cost of what you did. Not just the discovery moment. The years of hypervigilance, the health symptoms, the sleeplessness, the way she can’t put the phone down even now. That is the injury you caused. The most important thing you can do for your marriage is make it safe for her to get real help for what she’s carrying, and to be patient while she does.
Common Questions About the Detective PhaseIs it normal to keep checking even when I never find anything?Yes, and it’s one of the defining features of betrayal trauma. The absence of evidence doesn’t feel like safety to a nervous system that’s been trained to expect deception. Checking can become its own pattern, separate from the original threat. This doesn’t resolve on its own just because time passes — but it does respond well to treatment.
How do I know if my husband is still watching porn?Behavioural signs — secretive device use, defensive reactions when you ask questions, withdrawing from intimacy, or the pattern of cleared histories returning after promises to stop — can all be meaningful. But here’s the honest clinical answer: you often cannot know for certain from the outside. Accountability software, a structured disclosure process, and an assessment by a certified sex addiction therapist who works with him directly are more reliable than surveillance. And if he is unwilling to engage with any of those, that itself is important information about where he is in his recovery.
When does the hypervigilance stop?It tends to decrease as your own nervous system regulation improves, which is why betrayal trauma therapy — or any consistent healing support — is often more effective than waiting for external circumstances to feel safer. Some hypervigilance may return temporarily during setbacks or disclosures. That’s not a failure of your healing — it’s a normal trauma response. With the right support, the baseline shifts over time, and checking stops being the thing your whole day is organized around.
You Don’t Have to Keep Running the Investigation AloneIf you’re in the detective phase right now — whether it’s been three weeks or three years — you deserve more than a list of signs to watch for. You deserve actual support: someone to help your nervous system regulate, someone to help you get clear on your boundaries, and a framework for evaluating your husband’s recovery that doesn’t depend entirely on whether you catch him.
Our therapists specialize in this work. We work with betrayed partners and with couples navigating the long road of pornography addiction recovery, and we understand how different those two tracks of healing are, and why both of them matter.
If you’re ready to talk to someone, we offer a free 20-minute consultation so you can find the right fit before committing. You don’t have to keep running the investigation on your own. Reach out to our team whenever you’re ready.
You can describe everything that happened this week and feel nothing in particular. You handled the schedules, had the right conversations about the right things, kept the household going. Your marriage is functional. Maybe even impressive from the outside.
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But somewhere along the way, you stopped knowing what your spouse is actually carrying. Not the logistics. The real stuff. What’s worrying them at 2 a.m. What they’re quietly hoping for. What’s been hard that they haven’t named out loud yet.
That’s emotional intimacy in marriage, and it’s the first thing that slips when couples get good at running their life together.
If your conversations have been 90% logistical for longer than you can remember, this article is for you. Not for couples in crisis. For couples who are stable, functional, and quietly hungry for more connection than they’re getting.
What Roommate Syndrome Actually Is (and Isn’t)Roommate syndrome describes a marriage that functions smoothly on the surface but has lost the emotional closeness that makes partnership feel alive. You share a bed, a mortgage, and a calendar. You just stopped sharing your inner world.
Here’s the reframe that matters: the couples who drift into this pattern are often the ones who are best at being married in the logistical sense. The very competence that keeps your household running is what allowed the emotional drift to go unnoticed. You were too good at handling life to notice what you weren’t making time for.
In our practice, the couples who struggle most with emotional distance aren’t the ones who’ve had dramatic conflicts. They’re the ones where both partners describe the relationship as “fine.” That word does a lot of work. It holds everything that’s not quite wrong enough to address and not quite right enough to feel good about.
The Gottman Institute, after observing thousands of couples over four decades, found something worth sitting with: most couples weren’t fighting about specific topics like finances or parenting. They were fighting about a failure to connect emotionally, and many didn’t even recognize that’s what was happening. They were experiencing loneliness and lack of intimacy in marriage in a relationship that looked fine from the outside.
Roommate syndrome isn’t a sign that your marriage is broken. It’s a sign that life got busy and connection got deprioritized. That’s actually important to hear, because the path forward isn’t dramatic intervention. It’s intentional redirection.
What Emotional Intimacy Actually RequiresEmotional intimacy is the psychological bond built on mutual understanding, trust, and the freedom to be vulnerable without bracing for judgment. It’s knowing that your partner accepts the full picture of you, and that you can share what’s actually going on without editing yourself first.
True intimacy in marriage means knowing your spouse’s current reality, not just their old stories. It means knowing what’s keeping them up at night right now, not what they used to worry about three years ago. When couples stop updating that picture of each other, they end up relating to who their spouse was instead of who they actually are.
The Love Maps Strategy: Updating Your Emotional GPSJohn Gottman introduced the concept of “Love Maps” to describe the part of your brain where you store your partner’s inner world. Their current worries. Their evolving dreams. What they’re hoping for right now. The small stresses and private joys of their daily life.
In roommate mode, Love Maps become dangerously outdated. You may know your spouse’s work schedule but not what’s wearing them down this week. You might remember what they wanted five years ago but have no idea what they’re hoping for now. This gap creates a painful irony: you share a life but feel like strangers in it.
Signs Your Love Map Needs UpdatingAsk yourself honestly:
- Do you know what your spouse is currently worried about at work?
- Can you name the top two or three things stressing them out this week?
- What’s something they’re genuinely looking forward to right now?
- What’s a small thing that would make their day better today?
If you’re guessing or drawing blanks, your map needs work. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s what happens when two people focus on running a household rather than staying genuinely curious about each other.
Another sign: you catch yourself saying things like “You’ve changed” or “I don’t understand you anymore.” What’s actually happened is that your map stayed static while your partner kept evolving, as people do. You’re not relating to them. You’re relating to who you remember them being.
The Curiosity ApproachRebuilding emotional intimacy starts with genuine curiosity about who your spouse is today, not who they were when you got married. Intentionally cultivating that curiosity means choosing to keep discovering each other instead of relating to an outdated version of them.
The shift is small but significant. Instead of “I know you hate your job,” try “What’s been the hardest part of work lately?” Instead of “You never want to try new things,” try “Is there something you’ve been wanting to do that we haven’t made time for?” These aren’t therapy techniques. They’re just what it looks like to stay interested in your own spouse.
The goal is approaching these conversations as someone who genuinely wants to understand your partner’s experience, not as someone trying to fix problems or move through the conversation efficiently. Listen to understand. Not to respond, not to reassure, not to solve.
Building an Updated Picture DailyYou don’t have to have big conversations to keep your Love Map current. Small, consistent practices work:
- Ask one genuine question about their inner experience each day, not their schedule
- Notice what brings them joy or stress and actually remember it
- Share something about your own inner world without being prompted
This ongoing curiosity builds the foundation for deeper emotional intimacy over time. It’s also one of the most effective ways to keep the romance alive in your marriage. When you genuinely know your partner’s current reality, you can support them in ways that feel meaningful instead of generic.
Micro-Connections: The Daily Practices That Actually Move ThingsStop waiting for a vacation or a big date night to fix your marriage. Rebuilding emotional intimacy happens through consistent small moments, not occasional grand gestures.
Think about it this way: a two-week vacation represents 14 days out of 365. If you’re emotionally disconnected the other 351 days, no resort can repair that. But thirty seconds of genuine connection every day? That compounds into something real.
The 30-Second HugPhysical and emotional intimacy are not separate tracks. When you feel emotionally connected to your spouse, you naturally want physical closeness, and that physical closeness strengthens the emotional bond in return. Intentional physical affection is one of the simplest ways to start moving that cycle in the right direction.
The practice is simple: hold your spouse in a full embrace for 30 seconds without talking. Do this daily, ideally during natural transitions. When you wake up. When one of you comes home. Before bed.
Thirty seconds feels surprisingly long when you’re used to quick side hugs. That’s the point. This extended physical connection communicates presence in a way that words can’t replicate. You’re saying, without any words: I’m here, you matter, we’re in this together.
The Stress-Reducing ConversationSet aside 20 minutes at the end of the day for what Gottman researchers call a “Stress-Reducing Conversation.” This isn’t a time to problem-solve or discuss household logistics. It’s dedicated time for emotional connection.
The format is straightforward: take turns sharing what’s on your mind, what happened today, how you’re feeling. The listening partner’s only job is to understand, not to fix. Ask follow-up questions that show genuine curiosity. Offer empathy, not solutions.
The most common mistake here is moving to problem-solving too quickly. Your spouse shares that they felt undervalued at work, and you immediately suggest a plan. What they needed was for you to say: “That sounds really painful. Tell me more about what happened.” The solution can come later. The understanding has to come first.
Weekly Connection Practices
| Day | Practice | What It Does | | --- | --- | --- | | Monday | Ask “What are you most dreading this week?” | Updates your emotional map | | Tuesday | 30-second hug before leaving for work | Physical affection reset | | Wednesday | Share one thing you genuinely appreciate about your spouse | Builds trust through gratitude | | Thursday | Stress-Reducing Conversation (20 minutes) | Deep emotional check-in | | Friday | Ask “What would make this weekend feel restful for you?” | Shows curiosity about their needs, not just logistics | | Saturday | Device-free activity together (at least one hour) | Quality time without distraction | | Sunday | Share one hope or worry for the coming week | Practices vulnerability in a low-stakes way |
Moving from Safe Talk to Real TalkRebuilding emotional intimacy requires what we might call a vulnerability risk: the willingness to share more than feels comfortable.
Safe talk sounds like: “Work was fine.” Real talk sounds like: “I felt invisible in my meeting today and I can’t shake it.”
Safe talk sounds like: “I’m tired.” Real talk sounds like: “I’m worried I’m not being the parent I want to be, and it’s exhausting to keep up.”
Real talk feels harder because it opens you to the possibility of being dismissed or misunderstood. Those fears are valid. They’re also exactly why emotional safety has to come first. You can’t demand vulnerability from someone who doesn’t yet feel safe being vulnerable with you. You can only consistently demonstrate that you’re someone worth taking that risk with.
Start small. Share one real thing each day. A genuine worry, a quiet hope, something you felt but didn’t say. When your spouse responds with curiosity and care rather than judgment or advice, you’ll gradually feel safe enough to go deeper. That’s how this works. Not through a single vulnerable conversation, but through hundreds of small moments where you prove to each other that it’s worth it.
Physical Intimacy and the Emotional Connection Between ThemPhysical intimacy and emotional intimacy are deeply intertwined. When you feel emotionally close to your spouse, physical closeness follows naturally. When that physical warmth is present, it reinforces emotional safety in return.
Physical intimacy isn’t only about sex. It’s holding hands, a hand on the back, intentional touch that communicates care without needing words. These small acts of affection send a signal that gets received whether you’re conscious of it or not: I’m paying attention to you. You’re not invisible to me.
Research consistently shows that regular physical touch releases oxytocin, which strengthens emotional bonding and creates a sense of security in the relationship. That security is what allows vulnerability to happen. It’s hard to share your real inner world with someone whose physical presence feels distant or perfunctory.
Sexual intimacy is part of this picture too. Emotional intimacy and sexual intimacy feed each other in both directions. When couples feel genuinely connected, sexual desire tends to increase. When sexual intimacy is warm and present, it reinforces emotional closeness. The two are not separate tracks. If your sex life has become infrequent or mechanical, rebuilding emotional connection is usually the better starting point than focusing directly on sex, because most sexual disconnection is actually emotional disconnection in disguise.
Common Challenges (and What to Do About Them)We’re Too Exhausted for Deep ConversationsThis is the most common difficulty for parents and professionals. By the time the kids are in bed and the work email is handled, you have nothing left.
The answer isn’t longer conversations. It’s micro-moments. A 30-second hug. A two-minute check-in while making coffee. A meaningful text at lunch. These don’t require energy reserves you don’t have. The Stress-Reducing Conversation can happen in 20 minutes, not two hours. And honestly? A small moment of genuine connection is more valuable than an exhausted attempt at a deep conversation.
One of Us Wants More Connection, the Other Feels PressuredSometimes one spouse is eager to rebuild closeness while the other feels overwhelmed by expectations they can’t meet. This mismatch creates its own tension on top of the original disconnection.
If you’re the one who wants more, focus on creating conditions for safety rather than pushing for vulnerability. Small, low-stakes moments work better than big emotional asks. If you’re the one who feels pressured, know that “I felt stressed today” counts as emotional communication. You don’t have to start deep. You just have to start somewhere.
You can’t force someone to feel safe enough to be vulnerable. You can only consistently show them that you’re worth the risk.
We Start Strong But Fall Back Into Old PatternsYou try the practices, feel closer for a week, then life takes over and you’re back to logistics-only communication.
Build accountability into the system. Schedule your Stress-Reducing Conversation like a meeting that doesn’t move. Habit-stack your micro-connections by attaching them to things you already do. When you slip, and you will, don’t shame yourselves. Just restart the next day. Drift happens. Course-correcting is the skill worth building.
Past Hurt Makes Vulnerability Feel RiskyFor some couples, past arguments, betrayals, or patterns of dismissal have made vulnerability feel genuinely unsafe. One person shares something real, and the other stores it for use in the next conflict, or responds with criticism that makes sharing feel like a mistake.
This is where working with a couples therapist becomes important. When past patterns have eroded the emotional safety that vulnerability requires, you often can’t rebuild it on your own because the same dynamic keeps reasserting itself. A therapist provides structure and a third-party presence that changes what’s possible in those conversations. Recognizing when you’ve hit that wall isn’t failure. It’s accurate self-assessment.
When to Get Professional SupportCouples counseling isn’t a last resort. For many couples, it functions more like a spark plug: something that gets the process moving when you’ve been trying on your own and haven’t gotten traction. A skilled therapist helps create the conditions for real conversation, teaches you how to actually listen to each other, and guides you through patterns that are hard to see clearly from inside the relationship.
If your conversations have been primarily logistical for years, if past conflict has made vulnerability feel risky, or if you’ve tried these practices and keep sliding back into the same patterns, therapy is a reasonable next step, not a dramatic one. The couples who make the most progress are usually the ones who got help before the disconnection became entrenched.
If one of you is hesitant, there are ways to have that conversation that don’t feel like a threat or an ultimatum. Starting with a free consultation is often enough to make it feel less charged than it sounds.
Frequently Asked QuestionsHow do you know if you have roommate syndrome in your marriage?The clearest sign is that most of your conversations are logistical rather than emotional. You discuss schedules, tasks, and household issues but rarely share what you’re actually feeling, worried about, or hoping for. You feel lonely in the relationship even though you’re physically present with each other most evenings. If you can’t remember the last time your spouse said something that surprised you about how they actually feel, your emotional intimacy has likely eroded.
Can roommate syndrome be fixed without therapy?Yes, in many cases. If the disconnection is primarily a matter of drift rather than unresolved conflict or past hurt, intentional daily practices like the ones described here can rebuild emotional intimacy over time. The key is consistency. If you’ve tried and keep slipping back into old patterns, or if there’s real emotional safety work that needs to happen first, a couples therapist can help move things forward more effectively than going it alone.
How long does it take to rebuild emotional intimacy in marriage?There’s no fixed timeline, but most couples notice a meaningful shift within a few weeks of consistent daily practice. The practices don’t have to be long or elaborate. The 30-second hug, a genuine daily question, a 20-minute conversation without problem-solving: these small changes compound. The couples we work with who see the most progress are the ones who stop waiting for the perfect moment and start with small, consistent acts of turning toward each other.
What’s the difference between physical intimacy and emotional intimacy in marriage?Emotional intimacy is the psychological closeness that comes from knowing and being known by your partner: understanding their current fears, dreams, and inner world, and feeling accepted by them in return. Physical intimacy includes touch, affection, and sexual connection. The two are connected: emotional closeness tends to increase physical desire, and warm physical affection tends to deepen emotional safety. When one is absent, the other usually suffers too.
If you and your spouse have been running on parallel tracks for a while, you don’t have to stay there. The path back to emotional intimacy in marriage isn’t through a single breakthrough conversation. It’s through small, consistent moments of actually turning toward each other. That’s a practice you can start today.
A free 20-minute consultation with one of our therapists is a good place to start if you want some direction. You can learn more about our couples counseling here.
IntroductionYou start a conversation about the weekend, and five minutes later, you’re both shouting about something that happened three years ago. Sound familiar? This pattern—where simple discussions spiral into destructive arguments—affects millions of romantic relationships, leaving romantic partners feeling defeated, distant, and deeply misunderstood.
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Communication exercises for couples are structured techniques designed to create emotional safety and foster deeper connection between partners. These exercises promote better understanding and enhance communication by encouraging partners to listen actively and express themselves clearly. Unlike generic advice about “using I-statements,” these evidence-based approaches teach emotional attunement—the ability to sense and respond to your partner’s emotional state in ways that build trust rather than trigger defensiveness. This guide covers 9 proven exercises that go beyond surface-level tips to address the root causes of communication breakdowns in relationships.
This content serves committed couples who feel disconnected, unheard, or trapped in destructive communication patterns. Whether you’ve been together for two years or twenty, these techniques apply to anyone ready to transform how they communicate effectively with their partner.
The core insight: Communication exercises help couples create a “Safe Base” where conversations become bridges rather than battlefields. When partners feel heard and emotionally safe, the brain’s threat response deactivates, making genuine understanding biologically possible.
By implementing these exercises for couples, you will gain:
- Emotional safety that allows honest, vulnerable conversation
- Validation skills that defuse tension without requiring agreement
- Conflict de-escalation techniques backed by decades of research
- Deeper emotional intimacy through structured connection rituals
- Long-term relationship satisfaction built on mutual respect and understanding
Structured communication exercises promote empathy, active listening, and repair, which are essential for healthy dialogue. Good communication is a key factor in relationship satisfaction and can significantly improve relationships and strengthen relationships over time. Regular practice of communication exercises can transform these techniques into natural habits that strengthen relationships. Effective listening skills require conscious effort and practice, significantly impacting relationship satisfaction and mental health.
Understanding Emotional Attunement in RelationshipsEmotional attunement forms the foundation of all healthy relationships. It describes the capacity to perceive and respond appropriately to your partner’s emotional state—recognizing when they need support, space, or simply acknowledgment. Without attunement, even well-intentioned communication attempts fall flat because they miss what your partner actually needs in that moment.
When emotional safety is threatened, the brain’s limbic system activates fight-or-flight responses. This neurological hijacking floods the body with cortisol and adrenaline, effectively shutting down the prefrontal cortex—the brain region responsible for empathy, problem-solving, and rational thought. In this state, listening becomes biologically impossible. Your partner isn’t choosing to be defensive; their brain is protecting them from perceived danger.
Common communication mistakes that trigger this defensive response include criticism disguised as feedback, contempt expressed through eye-rolling or sarcasm, stonewalling through withdrawal, and dismissing your partner’s concerns as overreactions. Each of these signals threat rather than safety.
The Science of Safe CommunicationResearch shows that the first three minutes of any conversation typically determine its entire trajectory. A “harsh startup”—beginning with criticism, blame, or accusation—activates your partner’s amygdala, triggering a defensive response that can persist throughout the interaction. Once this neural cascade begins, productive dialogue becomes nearly impossible. Couples communicate most effectively when they stay focused on one issue at a time and model healthy dialogue, which helps prevent overwhelm and supports constructive conversations.
Gottman Method research tracking over 3,000 couples revealed that relationship “masters” use softened startups 96% of the time, while couples heading toward separation use them essentially never. This single behavioral difference predicts relationship outcomes with remarkable accuracy because it determines whether conversations begin from a foundation of safety or threat.
The neurological basis explains why your partner seems unreachable during heated moments. When one partner feels attacked, their brain diverts blood flow away from rational processing centers toward survival systems. Their heart rate increases, stress hormones surge, and the capacity for empathy temporarily disappears. Understanding this biological reality helps couples recognize that defensive reactions aren’t personal attacks—they’re involuntary protective responses.
Validation vs. Agreement: A Critical DistinctionHere’s an insight that transforms relationships: validation and agreement are completely different things. Validation acknowledges your partner’s emotional reality without endorsing their interpretation of facts. Agreement means you concur with their perspective. You can fully validate without agreeing at all.
Consider this example: “I can see you’re feeling overwhelmed and hurt right now (validation), even though I don’t think I caused this situation (no agreement required).” This response honors your partner’s emotional experience while maintaining your own perspective. It creates safety without requiring you to accept blame or abandon your position.
Why does validation work so powerfully? Studies indicate that validated partners are 50% more likely to de-escalate and engage productively. Neurologically, validation signals safety to the limbic system, lowering heart rates by an average of 10-15 beats per minute during conflict. When partners feel heard, their defensive posture relaxes, making genuine dialogue possible.
This distinction matters because many couples avoid validation, fearing it means conceding ground. Understanding that you can validate feelings while disagreeing with conclusions removes this barrier and opens pathways to deeper understanding. Validation also allows couples to connect on a deeper level, fostering more meaningful communication.
Foundation Exercises: Building Your Safe BaseBefore tackling specific conflicts or difficult conversations, couples must establish emotional safety through regular practice of foundational communication skills. Couples communication exercises are practical tools to improve dialogue and reduce barriers, helping partners foster understanding and emotional connection. These exercises create the secure attachment that allows vulnerability and honest expression, reflecting fundamental principles of good marriage communication. Think of them as building the container that can hold challenging content.
A foundational couples communication exercise is the love maps activity, which involves asking open-ended questions to learn about a partner’s current world—such as their hopes, stresses, and recent experiences.
Another effective foundational exercise is shared journaling, where partners alternate entries about their relationship experiences and appreciations, deepening mutual understanding and connection.
- The Softened Startup TechniqueThe softened startup technique instructs partners to lead with a neutral observation paired with a clear need rather than criticism or judgment. Research from the Gottman Institute demonstrates this approach reduces defensiveness by 85% by avoiding what researchers call the “Four Horsemen”—criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling—that predict relationship failure with 93% accuracy. This technique helps couples exchange thoughts and feelings in a productive manner, reducing defensiveness and promoting understanding.
The formula: Observation + Feeling + Need
Instead of: “You never help with household chores. I have to do everything around here.”
Try: “The kitchen has dishes piling up (observation), and I’m feeling overwhelmed (feeling). I need some help tonight so we can both relax later (need).”
The first version triggers defensive responses because it contains criticism (“you never”), mind-reading (“I have to do everything”), and implied character judgment. The second version describes reality without blame and makes a clear request that invites cooperation.
Practice exercise: Start with neutral topics before applying this to charged issues. Take turns describing minor inconveniences using the observation-feeling-need format. Notice how differently your partner responds compared to when you lead with frustration or accusation.
- Recognizing and Responding to Bids for ConnectionBids for connection—a cornerstone concept in relationship communication exercises—refer to subtle attempts at interaction. A sigh, a casual comment about a news story, a brief physical touch, or simply saying “look at this”—these small moments are actually invitations for emotional connection.
Research on 130 couples revealed that partners who “turn toward” bids (responding positively) 86% of the time report relationship satisfaction five times higher than those responding positively only 33% of the time. Turning toward builds what researchers call an “emotional bank account” that buffers relationships against stress. Turning away (ignoring) or against (responding with irritation) steadily depletes this account.
Three responses to bids:
- Turning toward: “That’s interesting—tell me more” (engagement)
- Turning away: “Mm-hmm” while continuing to scroll (dismissal)
- Turning against: “Can’t you see I’m busy?” (rejection)
Daily awareness exercise: For one week, consciously notice your partner’s bids throughout the day. Pay special attention to both verbal and non-verbal cues, such as a glance, a touch, or a change in tone—these are often subtle attempts at connection. By paying attention and being fully present, you ensure your partner feels heard and valued. Track how you respond—turning toward, away, or against. Aim to increase your “turning toward” responses by acknowledging even minor comments with eye contact, physical touch, or verbal engagement. This regular practice dramatically enhances connection.
- The Power of the PauseThis exercise addresses one of the most common communication breakdowns: interrupting or formulating rebuttals while your partner speaks. The pause technique trains couples to give full attention and space before responding. Uninterrupted listening is a key component of listening to understand in relationships, ensuring each partner can fully express themselves without being cut off.
The exercise: When your partner shares something, wait 5-10 seconds after they finish before responding. Use this time to breathe deeply and ensure they’ve fully completed their thought. Often, partners have more to say if given space.
Research shows this simple practice reduces interruptions by 70% and significantly increases felt validation. Brain imaging reveals that pauses activate mirror neurons responsible for empathy, allowing deeper understanding to emerge.
Breathing technique: If you feel the urge to interrupt or defend, take three slow breaths while maintaining eye contact. This physiologically calms your nervous system while signaling to your partner that you’re fully present.
Physical cue system: Establish a non-verbal signal (a gentle hand squeeze, palm facing up) that either partner can use to request a pause during conversation. This prevents escalation before it begins.
Creating a Positive Communication EnvironmentA positive communication environment is the foundation of healthy relationships and effective communication. It’s not just about what you say, but where and how you say it. Setting aside intentional time and space for conversations—free from distractions like phones, TV, or work emails—signals to your partner that their thoughts and feelings are a priority. This simple act creates a sense of emotional connection and safety, making it easier for both partners to open up honestly.
In these moments, practice active listening and reflective listening. Active listening means giving your full attention, showing genuine interest, and responding thoughtfully rather than reactively. Reflective listening goes a step further by paraphrasing what your partner has said, ensuring you’ve understood their message before responding. These effective communication techniques help prevent misunderstandings and foster a deeper emotional connection.
Making communication a regular part of your relationship—whether through daily conversations about everyday topics, weekly “state of the union” talks, or simply sharing about your day—strengthens your bond over time. When both partners feel comfortable and heard, it becomes easier to navigate challenges and celebrate successes together. By prioritizing a positive communication environment, you lay the groundwork for lasting intimacy and trust in your relationship.
Advanced Communication TechniquesBuilding on foundational skills, these structured exercises provide frameworks for deeper dialogue and sustained emotional connection between couples. Couples therapy exercises offer practical activities that can be practiced at home or during therapy sessions to improve communication and resolve conflicts.
- Speaker-Listener TechniqueThe speaker-listener technique, rooted in the PREP (Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program), mechanizes understanding over rebuttal. Meta-analyses of 30 studies show this approach improves relationship satisfaction by 25-40% after eight weekly sessions.
Speaker rules:
- Speak for 3-5 minutes uninterrupted using I-statements
- Focus on feelings and experiences, not accusations
- Hold a designated object (pen, small pillow) signifying speaker role
Listener rules:
- Give complete attention—no rebuttals forming mentally
- Practice active listening through body language and eye contact
- When speaker finishes, mirror back: “What I hear you saying is…”
- Paraphrase emotions: “You feel frustrated because…”
- Check for accuracy: “Did I get that right?”
- Switch roles only after speaker confirms understanding
Sample exchange:
Speaker: “When we had dinner with your parents last week, I felt invisible. Your mom kept asking you questions and I couldn’t get a word in. I felt like I didn’t matter to them—or maybe to you. I need us to be a team in those situations.”
Listener: “What I hear you saying is that you felt excluded at dinner, like you weren’t important. You’re frustrated and maybe hurt. You want us to present as united. Did I understand that correctly?”
Speaker: “Yes, exactly. And I want us to talk beforehand about how we’ll handle those dinners.”
Use this technique for important conversations where misunderstanding is likely. The structure prevents reactive responses and ensures both partners feel heard before problem-solving begins.
- Emotional Check-In RitualDaily emotional check-ins create consistent opportunities for connection, preventing emotional distance from accumulating over time. This couples therapy exercise takes just 10 minutes but yields significant improvements in emotional intimacy, similar to other simple daily marriage communication habits.
The format:
- 5 minutes per partner (use a timer)
- One partner shares while the other listens with full attention
- Listener responds only with reflective listening—no advice, no fixing
Question prompts:
- “What was the high point and low point of your day?”
- “What’s weighing on your mind right now?”
- “Is there anything you need from me emotionally today?”
- “What’s something you’re looking forward to?”
Guidelines: The goal is connection, not problem-solving. When one partner shares a work frustration, the appropriate response is empathy (“That sounds exhausting”), not solutions (“You should talk to HR”). This distinction preserves the check-in as a safe space for emotional expression.
Research shows couples who implement stress-reducing conversations—where one partner vents without receiving advice—report 35% lower conflict frequency and 50% higher positivity after just one month.
- The Repair ConversationEven successful couples experience communication breakdowns. The repair conversation provides a structured method for addressing ruptures after they occur, preventing resentment from accumulating.
Step 1 – Acknowledge the rupture: “I know our conversation yesterday didn’t go well. I want to address that.”
Step 2 – Take responsibility for your part: “I got defensive and stopped really listening. I raised my voice when you were trying to explain something important.”
Step 3 – Express the underlying intention: “What I actually needed was to feel like my perspective matters too. But I handled it poorly.”
Step 4 – Request and offer repair: “I’m sorry for shutting down. Can we try again? I want to understand what you were trying to tell me.”
Step 5 – Prevent recurrence: “In the future, when I feel defensive, I’ll say ‘I need a minute’ instead of escalating. Would that help?”
Taking responsibility during repair conversations doesn’t mean accepting full blame—it means owning your contribution to the breakdown. This models accountability and invites reciprocal vulnerability.
Improving Communication through Eye ContactEye contact is a powerful, often overlooked tool for building emotional intimacy and connection in romantic relationships. When you look your partner in the eyes during conversation, you’re sending a clear message: “I’m here, I care, and I’m fully present with you.” This simple act can deepen emotional connection, foster trust, and help both partners feel truly seen and valued.
To improve communication through eye contact, make a conscious effort to eliminate distractions during important conversations. Put away your phone, turn off the TV, and focus on your partner. Maintaining eye contact doesn’t mean staring intensely, but rather meeting your partner’s gaze naturally and warmly as you speak and listen. This nonverbal cue helps convey empathy, understanding, and openness—key components of healthy communication in relationships.
Research shows that couples who regularly use eye contact experience greater emotional intimacy and satisfaction in their romantic relationships. Eye contact also helps partners pick up on subtle emotional cues, making it easier to understand each other’s needs and feelings. By incorporating more eye contact into your daily interactions, you can strengthen your relationship and enhance your ability to communicate effectively.
Conflict Resolution and Difficult Conversation ExercisesWhen couples must navigate heated topics or ongoing disagreements, these structured exercises provide frameworks that prevent destructive patterns while facilitating deeper connections. Communication exercises for couples are especially effective in addressing relationship conflicts and preventing issues that arise from unmet expectations by encouraging open, honest dialogue.
A weekly check-in can be structured as a 30-minute meeting where partners discuss appreciation for each other, divide chores, and set or review relationship goals, helping to keep communication clear and expectations aligned.
- The 40-20-40 MethodThis method allocates time precisely: 40% for partner A to speak uninterrupted, 40% for partner B, and 20% for joint discussion. Trials demonstrate 60% improvement in conflict resolution scores following this exercise.
Phase 1 – Partner A speaks (8 minutes):
- Share perspective, feelings, and needs without interruption
- Partner B practices active listening, making brief notes if helpful
- No rebuttals, corrections, or defensive body language from listener
Phase 2 – Partner B speaks (8 minutes):
- Same rules apply
- Focus on own experience, not countering partner A’s points
- Express emotions and needs clearly
Phase 3 – Joint discussion (4 minutes):
- Identify areas of agreement or overlapping needs
- Brainstorm potential solutions together
- Focus on “we” rather than “you vs. me”
Practice scenario: A couple in gridlock over parenting approaches might use 40-20-40 to each express their fears, values, and hopes regarding discipline without defending against the other’s position. The joint discussion then seeks common ground—shared goals for their children’s wellbeing that can bridge different communication styles.
- Stress-Reducing ConversationExternal stressors—work pressure, family obligations, health concerns—frequently spill into relationships. This Gottman Method exercise creates space for partners to support each other through external influences without turning stress into conflict.
The format: 15-20 minutes where one partner vents about an external stressor while the other offers pure empathy—no advice, no problem-solving, no relating it back to themselves.
Listener guidelines:
- Respond with variations of “That sounds really hard”
- Ask clarifying questions: “What was that like for you?”
- Offer physical touch if welcome
- Resist the urge to fix, minimize, or one-up
- Validate feelings: “Anyone would feel frustrated by that”
Speaker guidelines:
- Focus on feelings, not just facts
- Let yourself be supported
- Don’t expect solutions—accept comfort
Weekly implementation: Schedule two sessions weekly (one per partner). Research indicates this regular practice measurably reduces conflict frequency while significantly increasing positivity in the relationship.
- Mirroring for Deep UnderstandingMirroring takes reflective listening deeper by requiring the listener to reflect content, validate emotions, and empathize with the speaker’s position—creating profound experiences of being truly understood. This process helps deepen connections by fostering empathy and emotional understanding between partners, much like learning to figure out what your spouse is actually upset about.
The three-step process:
Step 1 – Reflect: “What I heard you say is…” (summarize content accurately)
Step 2 – Validate: “It makes sense that you feel that way because…” (acknowledge the logic of their emotions given their experience)
Step 3 – Empathize: “I imagine you might also be feeling…” (extend understanding beyond what was explicitly stated)
Script example:
Partner A: “I feel like I’m always the one initiating plans with our friends. It makes me feel alone in the relationship, like you don’t care about our social life.”
Partner B reflects: “What I hear you saying is that you feel responsible for our social calendar, and that makes you feel isolated.”
Partner B validates: “It makes sense you’d feel that way—it’s exhausting to always be the organizer.”
Partner B empathizes: “I imagine you might also be feeling unappreciated, like your effort goes unnoticed.”
Common mistakes to avoid:
- Reflecting inaccurately (listen more carefully)
- Validating sarcastically (“Yeah, it makes total sense”)
- Empathizing with your own feelings instead of theirs
- Rushing through steps to make your own point
Couples Counseling and TherapySometimes, even the most committed couples need extra support to improve communication and break old patterns. Couples counseling and therapy offer a safe, structured environment where both partners can develop new communication skills and address challenges with the guidance of a trained professional. Online couples counseling focused on communication and emotional connection can help you identify unhelpful patterns, teach effective therapy exercises, and provide feedback tailored to your unique relationship.
Therapy approaches like the Gottman method and Emotionally Focused marriage counseling are grounded in decades of research and focus on building emotional safety, trust, and connection. Through regular practice of these techniques—both in and out of sessions—couples can enhance connection, resolve conflicts more productively, and increase overall relationship satisfaction. Therapy also encourages self reflection, helping each partner gain a deeper understanding of their own needs and how to communicate them effectively.
Working with a couples counselor isn’t just for relationships in crisis; it’s a proactive step toward healthier, more fulfilling relationships. By committing to regular practice and embracing positive change, couples can transform their communication, deepen their emotional bond, and create a foundation for long-term happiness together. If you’re ready to improve communication and strengthen your relationship, flexible online therapy with licensed counselors can be a powerful catalyst for growth and connection.
Common Challenges and SolutionsEven with concerted effort, couples encounter obstacles when implementing new communication patterns. It’s important to have difficult conversations in a private practice or dedicated setting, rather than in casual or public environments, to ensure both partners feel safe and focused. These solutions address the most frequent barriers.
Partner Refuses to ParticipateWhen one or both partners resist structured exercises, progress can feel impossible. However, meaningful change can begin with just one person.
Start with personal changes: Model new communication yourself. Use softened startups, validate without being asked, and pause before responding. Partners often mirror improved behavior without formal exercises.
Use invitation language: Instead of “We need to do these exercises,” try “I read about something that might help us feel more connected. Would you be open to trying it once?” Invitations feel safer than demands.
Focus on benefits, not problems: Frame exercises as enhancing connection rather than fixing dysfunction. “I want to understand you better” lands differently than “We have a communication problem.”
If your partner remains resistant, individual work with a couples counselor can help you develop coping strategies while creating positive change from your side.
Old Patterns Keep ReturningCommunication patterns developed over years don’t transform overnight. Setbacks are normal and expected—not signs of failure.
Normalize the learning curve: Research indicates only 40% of couples sustain new communication skills past three months without ongoing support. Struggle is part of the process.
Implement a reset signal: Establish a word or phrase either partner can say to pause a deteriorating conversation and start over. “Reset” or “Let’s try again” can prevent full escalation.
Schedule regular practice: Don’t rely on charged moments to practice skills. Set specific times—Sunday evenings, before bed—for structured exercises. This builds muscle memory before stakes are high.
Conversations Still Escalate Despite Best EffortsSometimes even practiced couples find conflicts intensifying beyond their capacity to manage. This signals the need for additional support.
Recognize when professional guidance is needed: Patterns rooted in attachment wounds, trauma history, or mental health concerns often require a trained therapist to navigate safely. There’s no shame in seeking couples therapy—it’s often the most efficient path to positive change.
Implement a circuit breaker: Agree that either partner can call a timeout when physiological flooding occurs (racing heart, shallow breathing, overwhelming emotion). Take at least 20 minutes apart doing something calming before reconvening.
Address underlying concerns: If one partner has unprocessed trauma or significant self esteem issues, communication exercises alone won’t resolve deeper wounds. Individual therapy alongside couples work creates the safest foundation for growth.
Conclusion and Next StepsEffective communication isn’t about finding the perfect words—it’s about creating emotional safety first. When partners feel heard and valued, conversations naturally become more productive. The exercises in this guide work because they address the neurological and emotional foundations that make genuine connection possible.
Immediate action steps:
- This week: Choose one foundational exercise (softened startups, bid recognition, or the pause) and practice daily for seven days
- Next week: Add one advanced technique (speaker-listener or emotional check-ins)
- Ongoing: Schedule weekly practice sessions and use repair conversations after any rupture
Remember: consistency matters more than perfection. Successful couples aren’t those who never fight—they’re those who’ve developed skills to reconnect after disconnection. Each exercise you practice strengthens relationship resilience.
As you develop these communication skills, you’ll likely notice improvement not just in your romantic relationship but in all your relationships. The capacity to listen deeply, validate feelings, and communicate needs clearly enhances every human connection.
Additional ResourcesWhile these exercises provide powerful tools for independent practice, couples often benefit from real-time guidance. A trained therapist acts as a communication coach who spots the subtle shifts in tone, body language, and emotional dynamics that partners miss when they’re in the heat of the moment.
Therapevo’s approach to couples communication coaching integrates evidence-based techniques from the Gottman Method and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). Our therapists work as real-time guides, helping couples navigate the nuanced dynamics of their unique relationship while building lasting communication skills.
Working with a couples counselor provides access to insights that self-practice cannot replicate. Research shows that 80% of couples require live coaching to fully master these techniques, as therapists can identify nonverbal cues—tone shifts, micro-expressions, patterns of emotional distance—that profoundly impact communication but often go unnoticed, which is why many couples choose secure online therapy with a carefully matched therapist.
If you’re ready to improve communication in your relationship with expert guidance, Therapevo’s free 20-minute consultation helps you discuss your specific situation and goals. This safe space allows you to explore whether working with a therapist is the right next step for strengthening your connection.
IntroductionMental load in marriage creates resentment when one partner carries the weight of anticipating, planning, and managing every aspect of household and family life while the other remains in a “helper” role. This resentment affects millions of marriages, and if you’re experiencing it, your anger is a legitimate response to an unfair partnership structure—not a character flaw.
https://youtu.be/LTW0tE1Srf4
Emotional labor refers to the invisible effort that partners undertake to keep their families running smoothly.
This article addresses the cognitive labor imbalance that leaves many women feeling like they’re operating as a “married single parent” despite having a spouse present. Women often carry a disproportionate share of the mental load in relationships, which can leave them feeling overwhelmed and resentful. The focus here is not on scheduling tips or chore charts. Instead, we examine the emotional and relational impact of inequity and provide a framework for restructuring partnership at a fundamental level. This content is for couples ready to move beyond surface solutions toward genuine systemic change.
Direct answer: Mental load resentment occurs when one spouse becomes the household CEO and COO—responsible for conceiving, planning, and monitoring all family needs—while the other partner acts as an employee who waits for direction. The resulting exhaustion and feeling of being overwhelmed and unseen creates resentment that signals a structural matter in the marriage, not a personal failing in either partner.
What you’ll gain from this article:
- Understanding why resentment develops as a valid emotional response to inequity
- Recognition that mental load is not “invisible work”—it’s entirely visible to the person performing it
- The critical difference between equality (50/50 task division) and equity (100/100 effort and ownership)
- A framework for shifting from “helping” to complete ownership of family domains
- Clarity on when professional support becomes necessary to restructure partnership safely
Understanding Mental Load in MarriageThe mental load includes anticipating needs, scheduling and planning, decision-making, and emotional labor in your marriage. It is made up of cognitive, managerial, emotional, and anticipatory components.
The mental load represents a full-time job that demands constant attention, mental space, and focus throughout the day, and the hidden costs of ongoing marriage problems often show up in health, work, and family functioning. Mental load encompasses anticipating, planning, remembering, and scheduling, acting as the project manager of the home. It includes the cognitive labor of anticipating family needs, identifying solutions, making decisions, and monitoring progress—activities that extend far beyond the physical execution of household tasks. This is not invisible work. It is entirely visible and exhausting to the person performing it, even when their partner fails to recognize its existence.
All the stuff involved in household management—like organizing schedules, delegating chores, and keeping track of what needs to be done—can create friction and resentment if not shared or acknowledged. Playing to each person’s strengths and using organizational strategies can help reduce tension and increase productivity in managing these responsibilities.
The Cognitive Labor RealityThe mental load means tracking which children need permission slips signed, remembering that the house is running low on toilet paper, anticipating that your mother-in-law’s birthday requires a gift purchased two weeks in advance, and knowing that your daughter’s friend group has shifted and she needs emotional support this week. This cognitive tracking never stops. There is no moment when the household management job ends and personal time begins.
Women often report feeling stressed out and resentful when they manage the majority of household responsibilities, and they rarely get to experience marriage as a source of stress relief rather than another demand.
Research demonstrates that this labor is linked to worse mental health outcomes for the person carrying it. A spouse’s mental health problems can further complicate this dynamic, amplifying tension and misunderstanding. Women’s sleep is more frequently disturbed by child-related concerns and partners’ employment issues, while men’s sleep disruption relates primarily to their own work concerns. The stress of never being “off duty” creates measurable physical health consequences—not because women are less resilient, but because the cognitive burden is genuinely heavier. Women are often expected not to forget important details or societal expectations, which adds to the pressure and mental load they experience.
The Manager vs. Helper DynamicIn most marriages, one partner becomes the household manager—the only person who holds the complete picture of family needs. The other partner operates as an employee, waiting for task assignments rather than taking proactive responsibility. This dynamic often develops along traditional gender role lines, and patterns like maternal gatekeeping and assumptions about a husband’s role at home can unintentionally keep fathers in a passive, “helper” position.
The manager tracks the family calendar, knows when the kids need new shoes, remembers which child has which dietary restriction, and anticipates seasonal transitions (winter coats, school supplies, holiday planning). The helper performs specific tasks when directed but doesn’t carry the cognitive weight of knowing what needs to happen and when. Women often feel unsupported and uncared for by their partners when they carry the mental load alone.
This isn’t about one partner being “naturally organized” and the other being “more relaxed.” That framing naturalizes an inequitable distribution and makes it appear unchangeable. In reality, the manager role is learned behavior, not personality—and the helper role is often a comfortable position that provides partnership benefits without partnership costs. Establishing a fair deal—mutual agreements or compromises—can help ensure responsibilities are divided more equitably and both partners share the mental load.
When “Helping” Becomes Part of the ProblemHere’s what many women find maddening: when a spouse asks “How can I help?” it sounds like partnership but actually increases the mental load. That question keeps the wife in the manager role, requiring her to assess what needs doing, determine what’s appropriate to delegate, provide instructions, and monitor completion. The “helper” receives credit for willingness to assist while avoiding the invisible work of conception and planning.
Women often report feeling resentful when they perceive an unfair division of labor at home, especially after having children.
Consider the example of a high-achieving professional—let’s call her Emma—who manages complex projects at her job with precision and authority. She comes home and manages the entire family’s social calendar, medical appointments, school requirements, and household logistics. Her husband asks “What do you need me to do?” and genuinely believes he’s being helpful. But Emma must now shift from her own work to perform another job: task manager for her spouse. She’s carrying two full-time cognitive positions, and the “help” actually adds a third: supervision.
The last thing Emma needs is another person to manage. What she needs is a partner who owns outcomes completely and is willing to act—taking initiative, communicating openly, and proactively sharing the mental load rather than waiting to be told what to do.
Why Mental Load Creates Legitimate ResentmentResentment in marriage is not something to suppress or “work on letting go.” When one partner carries disproportionate mental load while the other remains oblivious to the burden, resentment functions as an emotional alarm system. It signals that a partnership agreement has been broken—that the marriage is not operating as a team but as a hierarchy with one unpaid household manager and one comfortable beneficiary, a pattern that contributes directly to the hidden costs of marriage problems.
The Fairness FactorResearch across 32 different-sex couples found that the female partner completed more total cognitive labor than her husband in 81% of cases. Women perform significantly more anticipation and monitoring work—the “prep work” that precedes any visible task. Men often participate in final decisions without contributing the research, option identification, or problem-framing that makes decisions possible.
This means many women feel like they’re doing the job of two people while their spouse receives credit for participating in the comfortable, visible portions of family life. The husband who shows up at the school play feels like an involved dad. The wife who remembered to mark the calendar, arrange childcare for the other kids, coordinate departure time, and ensure the right clothes were clean feels like the only person actually running this family.
When you feel like a married single parent despite having a spouse present, your frustration isn’t wrong—it’s accurate.
The Exhaustion CycleThe permanence of mental load distinguishes it from physical tasks. A specific chore has a beginning, middle, and completion point. Cognitive labor is characterized by continuous, never-ending responsibility. The mental work of not forgetting important information—your child’s allergy, your spouse’s work schedule, the family’s social commitments—runs constantly in the background.
This permanence affects physical health through disrupted sleep, chronic stress, and the physiological consequences of never fully relaxing. It affects mental health through emotional exhaustion and the sense that you’re drowning while your partner floats comfortably. Prioritizing rest is essential for mental health and helps prevent burnout when managing the ongoing mental load. Women carrying disproportionate mental load report higher parenting role overload, lower life satisfaction, and stronger feelings of emptiness.
The exhaustion also erodes intimacy. When you’re the only person tracking whether there’s food in the house, whether the kids’ homework is done, whether anyone remembered to schedule the vet appointment, it’s difficult to feel romantic toward the partner who exists in blissful unawareness. Date nights feel like another thing on your task list rather than genuine connection.
The Recognition GapResearch reveals a fundamental perception gap: men often indicate they share household management tasks with their wives, while women indicate they do the tasks themselves. This isn’t deliberate dishonesty—it reflects genuinely different experiences of the same household. Some fathers even talk to their dad friends about their household involvement, sharing stories of feeling overwhelmed or underappreciated, and realizing these struggles are common among their peers.
The husband who cooks dinner twice a week may feel he’s contributing equally, unaware that his wife spent time meal planning, grocery shopping, ensuring ingredients were available, and will spend time cleaning up afterward. His cooking exists within an infrastructure of cognitive labor he doesn’t see.
This gap creates profound loneliness. The wife knows exactly how much she carries and feels unseen by the person who should know her best. The husband genuinely doesn’t understand her frustration and may feel attacked when she raises concerns. Both parties end up in defensive positions rather than addressing the structural problem.
The emotional labour of managing this gap—of trying to explain something your partner can’t perceive—adds yet another layer to the load. Friends can play a crucial role as support systems, offering emotional validation, advice, and shared experiences that help individuals cope with the mental load and navigate household responsibilities, much like a spouse who learns how to support their partner during hard times through sensitive, well-matched support.
From Helping to Ownership: Rebuilding True PartnershipMoving beyond resentment requires more than redistributing tasks. It requires a fundamental shift in how partners conceptualize their roles. The goal isn’t dividing a chore list more evenly—it’s creating genuine partnership where both people own outcomes rather than one person managing while the other assists. By reorganizing responsibilities and reducing resentment, couples can create more room for personal growth, self-care, and quality time together.
The Equality vs. Equity DistinctionEquality means splitting tasks 50/50. Equity means both partners invest 100% effort and take complete ownership of their domains. A happy marriage doesn’t require identical contributions; it requires equivalent commitment.
Steps for restructuring toward equity:
- Audit current reality honestly. Each partner writes down every cognitive task they perform over the course of a week—not just actions but mental tracking, anticipating, and planning. Compare lists without defensiveness.
- Identify strengths and genuine capacity. Consider who has more flexibility in their job, who has particular skills, and who has bandwidth during different seasons. Couples can benefit from discussing their individual strengths and preferences when dividing household tasks. This isn’t about who “naturally” does what—it’s about honest assessment of current capacity.
- Assign complete domain ownership. Don’t assign tasks; assign outcomes. One partner owns “children’s education” completely—school communication, homework support, activity coordination, academic planning. The other partner doesn’t “help” with education; they’re not involved in that domain. Assigning tasks based on individual strengths can lead to a more productive household.
- Establish accountability without micromanagement. The domain owner handles their area without needing to report, explain, or receive approval. If the other partner has concerns, they communicate directly without taking over management.
- Create regular partnership check-ins. Communicate regularly by scheduling weekly time to discuss how the system is working, adjust ownership as circumstances change, and address issues before they become resentment. Regularly scheduled household meetings can improve communication and efficiency in managing household tasks. Make time to talk about the relationship itself.
Domain Ownership Examples
| Household Area | Traditional “Helping” | Complete Ownership | | --- | --- | --- | | Meals | Partner asks “What should I make?” and waits for menu, recipe, and grocery list | Owner handles meal planning, grocery shopping, cooking, and cleanup for specific days without input needed | | Children’s Health | Partner drives to appointments scheduled by spouse, follows medication instructions given | Owner maintains relationship with pediatrician, schedules all appointments, tracks medications, manages sick days | | Social Calendar | Partner attends events spouse organized, buys gifts spouse selected | Owner maintains friendships, plans gatherings, handles gift-giving for their side of family completely | | Household Maintenance | Partner fixes things when spouse identifies problems and provides solutions | Owner notices what needs repair, researches options, hires contractors or handles repairs, manages completion | | Creating a list of household items that need to be done can help reduce friction in household management. Using shared digital tools, such as apps or online calendars, can also help manage responsibilities and keep track of tasks without relying on verbal reminders. |
The shift sounds like this: instead of “Let me know if you need help with the kids’ doctors,” it becomes “I’m responsible for all medical decisions and logistics for our children. You don’t need to think about it.”
When both partners own domains completely, neither carries the cognitive burden of managing the whole house while also managing their spouse’s contributions. By identifying what truly matters, couples can also choose to drop non-essential tasks, simplifying routines and reducing stress.
Common Challenges and SolutionsChallenge: “But I Don’t Do It Right”When one partner takes over a domain, the other may criticize their approach. The kids’ lunches aren’t packed the same way. The house isn’t cleaned to the same standard. The bills are paid differently.
Solution: Letting Go of ControlSolution: The person who previously managed this domain must accept that ownership means letting go of control. Different approaches aren’t wrong—they’re different. Unless there’s genuine harm, the new owner’s methods stand. If you can’t release control, you haven’t actually transferred ownership; you’ve just added supervision to your load.
Challenge: “I Don’t Notice What Needs to Be Done”Many partners genuinely claim they don’t see the mess, don’t notice supplies running low, and don’t anticipate needs the same way their spouse does.
Solution: Developing Observation SkillsSolution: Noticing is a skill, not a personality trait. The partner taking on new domains commits to developing observation skills—actively scanning their environment, maintaining their own systems for tracking needs, and learning through practice. They don’t expect their spouse to point out what they’re missing; they figure it out themselves. “I didn’t notice” stops being an acceptable excuse after three months of intentional practice.
Challenge: High-Conflict ConversationsWhen resentment has built significantly, conversations about mental load often devolve into blame, defensiveness, and character attacks. Each partner feels misunderstood. Applying skills like supporting your spouse even when you disagreecan reduce reactivity, but without them, the discussion generates heat but no progress.
Solution: Seeking Professional SupportSolution: This is where professional support becomes necessary. When you can’t discuss the system of your house without fighting about the failures of each person, you need a third party to hold the space. Online couples counseling focused on rebuilding partnership provides the safe base required for productive conversation—ensuring both partners feel heard, redirecting blame toward structural solutions, and facilitating agreements that stick.
Couples therapy isn’t an admission of failure. It’s recognition that some conversations require expert facilitation, especially when years of resentment make direct communication impossible.
Conclusion and Next StepsMental load resentment signals a structural problem in your marriage—not a character flaw in either partner. Your anger about carrying disproportionate cognitive burden is valid. Your exhaustion is real. Your sense that the partnership isn’t functioning as a team reflects accurate perception, not oversensitivity.
Addressing this requires moving beyond chore redistribution toward genuine ownership restructuring. Both partners must commit to systemic change rather than surface adjustments.
Immediate Steps* Conduct an honest audit of current mental load distribution by tracking cognitive labor for one week * Identify three specific domains where ownership can transfer completely to the partner currently in the “helper” role * Establish a three-month trial period for new arrangements with weekly check-ins to discuss what’s working
Prioritizing self-care is essential for maintaining mental health and preventing burnout. Make conscious decisions about time spent on self-care, friendships, and personal passions, as these directly improve well-being and relationship satisfaction.
When Professional Support is NeededIf conversations about mental load consistently become fights, if your spouse cannot acknowledge the imbalance exists, or if resentment has eroded your ability to communicate without character attacks, seek couples therapy. Therapevo’s online couples counseling for every couple provides the structured environment necessary to rebuild partnership without the conversation collapsing into blame.
Practicing Gratitude and AppreciationPracticing gratitude and appreciation for each other’s contributions can also help reduce resentment and foster a more supportive relationship.
Additional ResourcesMental Load Assessment:
- Each partner independently lists every cognitive task they perform in a week—including anticipating needs, tracking information, and coordinating logistics.
- Compare lists to establish baseline reality.
Domain Ownership Worksheet:
- Map all household and family domains (meals, children’s education, medical care, social relationships, finances, home maintenance).
- Assign complete ownership for each domain to one partner.
Therapevo Specialized Approach:
- When resentment prevents productive restructuring conversations, Therapevo’s couples counselors facilitate the shift from blame to systemic solutions, helping partners design sustainable ownership structures while addressing the emotional damage from years of imbalance.
IntroductionThe negative interaction cycle in marriage is the invisible force keeping you trapped in the same painful conflict over and over—even when you both desperately want things to change. If you feel stuck in repetitive arguments that escalate from nothing, sensing emotional distance despite genuinely loving your partner, you’re experiencing what emotionally focused therapy calls the “dance of disconnection.”
https://youtu.be/U4uXpwofSiQ
This article covers the EFT approach to understanding and breaking negative cycles in marriage. We’re not offering quick communication fixes or better chore charts. Instead, we’re exploring the deeper emotional architecture beneath your conflicts—the attachment needs, vulnerable feelings, and protective behaviors driving the pursuer-distancer pattern that affects over 80% of couples in distress. This content is for married couples who feel trapped in the same fights, who know they are stuck in unhealthy patterns despite their commitment to one another, and who are ready to understand why unhealthy conflict keeps happening.
Here’s the shift that changes everything: Your partner is not the enemy. The cycle is the enemy. When you stop blaming each other and start tackling the pattern together, healing becomes possible.
By the end of this article, you will:
- Recognize the “Protest Polka” and how it operates in your marriage
- Understand the difference between primary and secondary emotions in conflict
- Identify your specific role in your couple’s negative cycle
- Learn EFT-based steps to create positive change and restore emotional connection
- Know when and how to seek specialized couples therapy support
Understanding the Negative Interaction Cycle in MarriageA negative cycle is a repeated pattern of interaction that leaves partners in a rough emotional and relational state. These cycles are unconscious dances where each partner’s protective moves trigger the other’s deepest fears. It’s not about who started it or who is “more wrong”—it’s a self-perpetuating system that takes on a life of its own, creating emotional distance even when both partners want closeness. Negative cycles often begin with small triggers that escalate into larger conflicts.
Negative cycles in relationships often stem from unmet attachment needs and emotional vulnerabilities. When partners do not feel secure or valued, their emotional responses and protective behaviors can create and reinforce these negative patterns.
Attachment theory, the foundation of emotionally focused therapy, explains why these patterns hold such power. When your sense of emotional safety feels threatened—when you wonder “Do I matter to you?” or “Am I enough?”—your nervous system activates survival-level responses. These responses made sense earlier in life. Past experiences, such as childhood or earlier relationships, can shape your current emotional triggers and patterns, making it harder to break free from negative cycles. In your marriage, they can create a vicious cycle.
It’s important to remember that these negative interaction cycles are a human experience—every couple is susceptible to them because of our universal human attachment needs.
The Cycle as a Self-Perpetuating SystemPicture an infinity loop where Partner A’s behavior triggers Partner B, whose response triggers Partner A, around and around with increasing intensity. This cyclical causality means both partners genuinely feel like they’re just reacting to what the other did first. And they’re both right—and both wrong.
Let’s look at an example to illustrate how negative cycles operate. When Sarah raises her voice about the dishes left in the sink, she’s reacting to Mark’s silence from earlier. When Mark retreats to the garage, he’s reacting to Sarah’s tone. Each person experiences themselves as responding, not initiating. Couples often misinterpret each other’s actions and intentions, which can perpetuate the negative cycle. This is why arguments about “who started it” never resolve anything—the cycle has no beginning.
The real issue isn’t the dishes, the tone, or even the specific words spoken. The triggering event activates something deeper: unmet attachment needs. When emotional connection feels uncertain, our protective behaviors emerge automatically, faster than conscious thought.
Primary vs Secondary Emotions in the CycleUnderstanding this distinction is the first step toward breaking free from negative patterns. Here, we will explain why it’s important to distinguish between primary and secondary emotions—so you can better understand the underlying dynamics of the negative interaction cycle in marriage.
Secondary emotions are the ones on the surface—the reactions your partner sees and responds to. Anger, criticism, defensiveness, withdrawal, eye-rolling, the sharp edge in your voice. These are protective behaviors designed to manage the pain underneath.
Primary emotions are the raw, vulnerable feelings driving everything: fear of abandonment, terror of being inadequate, deep sadness over lost connection, shame about not being enough, loneliness even while sitting next to your partner.
Here’s what makes negative cycles so persistent: fights happen at the secondary level, but healing requires accessing primary emotions. When you’re caught in the dance, you’re both reacting to each other’s protective surfaces rather than connecting with the hurt beneath. Both partners in a negative cycle often feel misunderstood and disconnected from each other.
The Protest Polka: How Couples Get Stuck in Pursuing and WithdrawingThe “Protest Polka” is the most common negative cycle pattern in marriage, affecting roughly 80% of distressed couples. The Pursuer-Distancer dynamic is a common negative cycle where one partner seeks closeness while the other withdraws, mirroring the demand–withdraw cycle seen in many distressed marriages.. It’s a rhythmic, escalating interplay where one partner’s pursuit for connection triggers the other’s withdrawal for self-protection, creating a feedback loop that intensifies over time.
Let’s continue to unpack the interaction between Sarah and Mark to understand this “dance” as it unfolds between them.
The Pursuer’s ExperienceSarah is the pursuer in this cycle. Her pursuit—the criticism, the raised voice, the following Mark into the garage—isn’t about control or nagging. It’s protest. It is a desperate attempt to reconnect and restore the deeper fear of, “Do I matter to you?”
Her secondary emotions are what Mark sees: frustration, criticism, demanding, escalating volume. Sometimes words come out that she regrets later.
Her primary emotions are what she feels inside: fear of abandonment, the pain of feeling unimportant, grief over the loss of emotional connection they used to have, terror that she’s losing him without knowing why.
But the key is her attachment need, the question burning beneath it all: “Do I matter to you? When I reach for you, will you be there?”
When the distancer retreats, the pursuer’s worst fears feel confirmed. So she reaches harder, protests louder, hoping something will finally break through. The cycle intensifies. She is increasing her pursuit intensity because Mark is so important to her.
The Withdrawer’s ExperienceMark is the withdrawer. His withdrawal—the silence, retreating to the garage, the flat facial expression—isn’t apathy or laziness. It’s protection. An attempt to preserve the relationship from further damage. It’s like he’s driven by the thought, if I can just calm this down enough and not say anything stupid, then maybe this will blow over and we’ll be OK again.
Of course, Sarah doesn’t see that. She sees his secondary emotions and the behaviors that flow from them: numbness, shutdown, appearing indifferent, walls going up. Sometimes it looks like he doesn’t care at all.
But his primary emotions are what’s actually happening: fear of failure, feeling overwhelmed by the intensity of Sarah’s distress, deep inadequacy for not knowing how to fix this, and shame that he never seems to be enough no matter what he does.
His attachment need, the question he can’t voice and probably isn’t aware of (but is driving this) is: “Am I enough for you? Can I ever make you happy, or will I always fall short?”
When the pursuer escalates, the distancer feels overwhelmed. So he retreats further, trying to calm things down, hoping space will help. Hi increases his withdrawing to avoid escalating into the conflict that he fears will finally cause him to lose the most precious person in his life. Instead of calming things, the cycle intensifies.
How the Dance EscalatesThis is where the vicious cycle gains power. The more Sarah pursues, the more Mark withdraws. The more Mark withdraws, the more Sarah pursues. Each partner’s protective behavior confirms the other’s deepest fears:
- Sarah’s criticism confirms Mark’s fear that he’s inadequate
- Mark’s withdrawal confirms Sarah’s fear that she doesn’t matter
- Both feel hurt, both feel misunderstood, both feel stuck
- Neither one are intentionally acting to confirm those deep fears
The pattern repeats across different topics—dishes, intimacy, parenting decisions, time spent on phones. The content changes. The cycle stays the same. To break the negative interaction cycle in marriage, each partner must consciously act—taking deliberate steps to name emotions, communicate needs, or reach out for support—rather than simply reacting automatically.
Clinical Insight: In emotionally focused therapy sessions, therapists help couples identify this exact dance in real-time. They slow the interaction down, moment by moment, helping each partner see how their moves affect each other. Often, couples realize for the first time that their partner’s hurtful behavior comes from the same place of pain and fear as their own. This quickly leads to softening between the spouses. Understanding and communicating about the negative cycle is essential for rebuilding trust and connection after infidelity. The role of professional EFT marriage therapists is crucial in guiding couples through the process of transforming their relationship dynamics.
Feeling Safe in RelationshipsWhy Safety MattersYour ability to feel truly safe with your partner isn’t just important—it’s the foundation that transforms your relationship from surviving to thriving. When you both experience genuine emotional and relational safety, something powerful happens: your walls come down, your authentic self emerges, and you discover a level of connection you may have thought was impossible.
This isn’t just about feeling comfortable; it’s about breaking free from the exhausting cycles that keep you feeling disconnected and misunderstood.
How Protective Patterns FormWe understand how painful it feels when that safety doesn’t exist in your relationship. You find yourself trapped in protective patterns—maybe you criticize to avoid being hurt, withdraw to feel safe, or go silent to prevent conflict.
These responses make complete sense given what you’re experiencing, but here’s what’s happening: each protective move creates more distance between you and your partner, making even the smallest disagreements feel overwhelming and leaving you both feeling increasingly alone and misunderstood.
Building Emotional SafetyThis is exactly why Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) exists—to give you and your partner the tools to recognize these destructive patterns and understand the deeper emotions and unmet needs driving them.
In EFT-based online couples therapy, you’ll work in a carefully created safe space where you can finally express your most vulnerable feelings without fear of judgment or rejection.. You’ll gain the insight to see the patterns that have kept you stuck and develop the skills to respond to each other with genuine empathy and care.
Imagine what becomes possible when you feel truly safe in your relationship: you’ll find the courage to share your deepest fears, ask for what you actually need, and admit when you’re hurting.
This kind of emotional openness is what creates the authentic connection you’ve been longing for and empowers you to break free from disconnection for good.
As you and your partner practice recognizing and discussing your patterns together, you’ll discover that navigating conflict becomes easier, repairing after disagreements feels natural, and maintaining that strong, loving bond becomes your new reality.
If you’re struggling to feel safe or connected in your relationship right now, you need to know something important: you’re not alone in this experience, and transformation is absolutely within your reach.
With the right support and your shared commitment to truly understanding each other, you can create entirely new patterns that build unshakeable trust, deep intimacy, and the lasting relationship satisfaction you deserve.
Breaking Free from the Negative Cycle: The EFT ApproachHere’s the challenge: mapping your conflict cycle while you’re caught inside it is like trying to read a map while running from a bear. Your nervous system is activated, your protective behaviors are in full effect, and your capacity for reflection shrinks dramatically.
This is why emotionally focused marriage counseling support matters. But understanding the process can help you begin to shift the pattern and create space for positive interactions..
The most important insight from emotionally focused therapy: Your partner is not the enemy. The cycle is the problem. When you truly realize this—not just intellectually but in your body—everything changes. You can turn toward your partner as an ally against the pattern that’s been hurting you both.
Step 1: Recognize Your Cycle TriggersThe first step is developing awareness of the specific moments when your negative cycle activates. These triggering events often seem small from the outside but carry enormous emotional weight:
- A particular tone of voice your partner uses
- A specific facial expression (or lack of eye contact)
- A behavior pattern (coming home late, being on the phone, forgetting something important)
- Physical cues (turning away, sighing, silence)
Notice what happens in your body at these moments:
- Racing heart
- Tight chest
- Knot in stomach
- Heat in your face
These physiological responses signal that your attachment system is activated—that something feels threatening to your emotional safety.
The connection between body awareness and cycle activation is crucial. Often your body knows you’re entering the conflict cycle before your mind catches up. Learning to recognize these signals gives you precious seconds to choose a different response.
Step 2: Map Your Emotional ResponsesThis step requires honest self-reflection. When you’re triggered, what do you actually feel?
Start with secondary emotions (the protective surface):
- “I feel angry”
- “I feel like shutting down”
- “I feel like I need to make my point heard”
- “I feel like I need to get away”
Then dig beneath to primary emotions (the vulnerable truth):
- “I feel scared that I don’t matter”
- “I feel ashamed that I’m failing again”
- “I feel lonely even when you’re right here”
- “I feel terrified that you’re going to leave”
Understanding how the five pillars of attachment shape your attachment style feeds into these patterns helps make sense of your reactions.. The attachment theory foundation of EFT recognizes that our early experiences shape how we respond when connection feels threatened, including patterns like anxious attachment in marriage. This isn’t about blame—it’s about understanding why you react the way you do.
Step 3: Share Your Inner ExperienceThis is where positive change happens—and where couples often need professional support. Sharing vulnerable feelings when you’ve been feeling hurt and defensive requires tremendous courage and emotional safety.
The communication patterns that break cycles focus on primary emotions and unmet needs rather than your partner’s behavior:
- Instead of: “You never listen to me!” (secondary/attacking)
- Try: “When you go quiet, I feel scared that I don’t matter to you. I need to know you’re still with me.” (primary/vulnerable)
- Instead of: Withdrawing in silence (secondary/protective)
- Try: “I feel overwhelmed right now and scared I’m going to say something wrong. I need a minute, but I’m not leaving.” (primary/connected)
This kind of sharing requires that you feel safe enough to be vulnerable, and learning how vulnerability deepens intimacy in marriage can reframe these risks as pathways to closeness. For many couples in entrenched negative cycles, creating that safety requires outside help..
Creating New Patterns TogetherThe shift from old patterns to new ones happens gradually, through repeated practice in low-stakes moments:
| Old Cycle | New Pattern | | --- | --- | | Trigger activates | Trigger activates | | Secondary emotion takes over | Pause, notice body response | | Protective behavior emerges | Identify primary emotion | | Partner’s defensive response | Share vulnerable feeling | | Cycle escalates | Partner responds with empathy | | Emotional distance increases | Emotional connection strengthens | | As you practice these new patterns, the sound and tone of your communication—such as speaking with warmth, presence, and authenticity—can help convey emotional safety and deepen your connection, making the changes more effective. |
This new process doesn’t happen overnight. It requires both partners committing to the same goal: defeating the cycle together rather than defeating each other. Each successful moment where you break the pattern builds relationship satisfaction and makes the next moment easier.
Common Challenges in Breaking the CycleUnderstanding negative patterns intellectually is one thing. Actually changing them is another. Here’s why cycles persist despite good intentions—and what helps.
Challenge: VulnerabilityAfter years of unhealthy conflict, opening up feels dangerous. Your protective behaviors exist for a reason—they’ve been trying to keep you safe.
Asking you to drop those defenses while your partner still feels like the enemy can seem impossible.
Solution: Start small. Practice sharing vulnerable feelings in low-stakes conversations before attempting it during conflict. Notice moments when you do feel safe with your partner—even briefly—and build from there. If vulnerability feels impossible, that’s important information about how much hurt has accumulated. A skilled therapist can help create the safety needed for this work.
Challenge: Partner ChangeIt’s easy to see your partner’s role in the cycle while staying blind to your own. You might feel like you’ve tried everything while they keep repeating the same patterns.
Solution: Focus entirely on your own role in the cycle. You cannot control your partner’s behavior, but you can change yours. When you shift—even slightly—the dance changes. Often, modeling vulnerability invites your partner to risk the same. If they remain stuck in protective behaviors despite your efforts, couples therapy provides neutral ground where both partners can be seen and guided.
Challenge: Old Patterns ReturnProgress isn’t linear. Stress, illness, major life transitions, or accumulated resentment can reactivate cycles you thought you’d broken.
This feels discouraging, but it’s completely normal.
Solution: Develop cycle repair skills. Learn to recognize when you’ve fallen back into the pattern and talk about it together: “I think we just did our cycle. Can we try again?” Practice self-compassion in your marriage—you learned these patterns over a lifetime, and unlearning takes time.. Professional guidance helps you build resilience so setbacks become learning opportunities rather than proof of failure.
Conclusion and Next StepsThe negative interaction cycle in marriage is common—affecting the vast majority of couples in distress—but it’s not permanent. With understanding and specialized support, couples maintain and restore emotional connection even after years of feeling stuck.
Emotionally focused therapy works because it addresses the root cause: unmet attachment needs and the protective behaviors we develop when emotional safety feels threatened. When both partners can feel loved, feel safe, and trust that they matter to each other through secure attachment in marriage, the cycle loses its power..
Your immediate next steps:
- Identify your cycle pattern: Are you more pursuer or withdrawer? What triggers activate you? What primary emotions hide beneath your secondary reactions?
- Practice distinguishing primary from secondary emotions: In low-conflict moments, notice what you’re actually feeling beneath your automatic responses.
- Consider professional EFT support: Mapping and breaking entrenched cycles is difficult to do alone—therapists provide the safe base needed to access vulnerability without the conversation spinning back into the old dance.
Specialized couples therapy offers what self-help cannot: an outside perspective that sees both partners’ pain, slows the cycle in real-time, and guides you toward new patterns of connection. Marriage retreats provide intensive environments where this work can happen with focused attention.
Related topics worth exploring include attachment styles and how early life shapes adult relationships, emotional regulation skills for managing intensity during conflict, and immersive experiences like marriage retreats or online couples counseling options for every couple that accelerate the healing process..
Additional ResourcesEFT Couples Therapy: Professional support for mapping and breaking your specific negative cycle with a trained emotionally focused therapy clinician.
The Marriage Cruise for Christian Couples: An immersive retreat experience combining clinical tools with relationship renewal in a unique setting designed for deep work.
Free 20-Minute Consultation: A cycle assessment conversation to help you understand your patterns and explore next steps for your specific situation.
Attachment Theory Resources: For deeper understanding of how attachment styles feed into relationship patterns and what creates lasting positive change.
Pornography addiction creates a specific kind of pain in marriage—one where partners feel invisible even during physical closeness, where trust has been shattered by secrecy, and where the bedroom becomes a place of anxiety rather than connection. The emotional devastation of infidelity, whether through physical or sexual betrayal, can deeply impact trust and attachment, compounding the challenges couples face. If you’re struggling with this reality, rebuilding intimacy is possible, but it requires understanding the distinct phases of recovery and committing to a process that prioritizes presence over performance.
https://youtu.be/86_yXoCmulQ
This guide focuses specifically on restoring physical intimacy within marriage where one partner is recovering from porn addiction both are ready to begin the careful work of reconnecting physically and emotionally. This matters because many addicts who achieve sobriety from pornography still find they and their partner are stuck: the addiction has stopped, but genuine intimacy remains elusive.
The core answer: Rebuilding intimacy after porn addiction requires moving from sexual sobriety (choosing abstinence to break addiction cycles) to sexual health (gradual re-humanization of physical connection) through structured exercises that keep both partners present in their bodies rather than drifting to digital fantasies or traumatic imagery. Reconnecting after porn addiction requires a multifaceted approach focused on rebuilding safety, trust, and genuine emotional closeness.
By working through this guide, you will gain:
- Clear understanding of the difference between sexual sobriety and sexual health
- Practical tools for the recovering partner to stay present during intimacy
- Strategies for the betrayed partner to address comparison anxiety and betrayal trauma
- Step-by-step Sensate Focus exercises for rebuilding touch without pressure
- Communication techniques that create emotional safety for physical reconnection
Both partners must be accountable and take responsibility for their roles in the recovery process, fostering mutual support and growth as you rebuild intimacy together.
Understanding Sexual Recovery in MarriageSexual recovery in marriage operates in two distinct phases that many couples conflate, leading to frustration and relapse: sobriety and health. Understanding this distinction provides the framework for the entire healing process and helps both partners recognize where they are in the journey.
The recovery process requires shared responsibility, with both partners being accountable for their roles in rebuilding intimacy and trust. Emotional support, open communication, and mutual reciprocity are essential for maintaining recovery and fostering growth within the relationship.
Couples therapy is often recommended to support this process.
Sexual Sobriety: The Foundation PhaseSexual sobriety refers to complete abstinence from pornography, masturbation, and often orgasm outside of marital intimacy. This phase exists to reset neural pathways that have been hijacked by the addiction cycle and to break the escalation pattern where increasingly explicit content was required for arousal.
For the individual in recovery, this phase interrupts the dopamine-driven habit that prioritized novelty and control over genuine connection. Or, as we often like to say, that prioritized intensity over intimacy. For the marriage, sexual sobriety establishes safety—the betrayed partner needs evidence that their spouse can maintain boundaries before vulnerability becomes possible again.
This abstinence period typically lasts 30 to 90 days and will often include abstinence from marital sex as well. Research from recovery programs indicates that 60% of those recovering from sexual addiction maintain sobriety when their partner is actively involved in the process, compared to significantly lower rates for solo efforts. The goal isn’t punishment but recalibration—allowing the brain’s reward system to normalize so that real-life connection can once again produce genuine arousal. Part of the recalibration serves to help the addict’s brain and nervous system to realize that it actually can survive without orgasm for a good period of time.
Sexual Health: The Restoration PhaseSexual health represents the gradual return to intimate connection based on presence, mutuality, and emotional safety. Unlike sobriety’s abstinence focus, sexual health emphasizes what you’re building toward: sex as a mutual, embodied, emotionally rich exchange that honors your spouse’s uniqueness.
This is where the re-humanization of sexuality occurs. Porn addiction trains the brain to view sex through a lens of objectification, instant gratification, and scripted scenarios. The person using pornography controlled every variable—what they watched, when, and how. Real intimacy offers none of this control, which is precisely what makes it valuable and why it initially feels inadequate to a brain conditioned by pixels.
The transition from sobriety to health requires addressing both partners’ internal motivation and readiness. Rushing this transition could result in relapse or retraumatization. Many couples find that couples therapy during this phase helps navigate the timing and provides safe space to talk about what is required for continued growth.
Before moving to sexual health, however, one critical element must be addressed (assuming the addict has established sobriety): the betrayed partner’s trauma response to the addiction.
Addressing Partner Fears and Comparison AnxietyThe betrayed partner in a marriage affected by pornography addiction carries wounds that don’t disappear simply because the behavior has stopped. Honest communication about these fears and targeted strategies for addressing them create the emotional foundation necessary for restoring intimacy.
Understanding “Screen Comparison” TraumaPartners of those with porn addiction frequently develop intense anxiety about their bodies, sexual performance, and desirability. This isn’t insecurity or jealousy—it’s a logical response to discovering that their spouse sought sexual fulfillment through images of other people’s bodies.
The fear manifests in specific ways: “Will my husband think of those images when we’re together?” “How can my body compete with what he’s seen?” “Does she wish I looked different?” These questions create a state of hypervigilance that makes physical intimacy feel threatening rather than connecting. This, of course, is very counterproductive to sexual arousal and enjoyment.
Many women and men in this situation report that intimacy itself triggers traumatic imagery—they visualize the pornography their spouse consumed, even though they’ve never seen it. This intrusive experience mirrors PTSD symptoms, with research indicating that approximately 40% of betrayed partners experience persistent intrusive thoughts long after disclosure. Understanding this as betrayal trauma rather than shaming the addict for moral failure or the betrayed spouse for oversensitivity helps both partners approach recovery with compassion.
Tools for Partner HealingThe betrayed partner needs grounding techniques to stay present in their own body during intimacy rather than spiraling into comparison or traumatic imagery.
Physical grounding during intimacy:
- Focus on your own sensations—what you feel in your skin, not what you imagine your partner is thinking
- Use breath as an anchor, taking slow inhales and exhales to stay in the present moment
- If triggered, ask to pause and then work together to regulate your nervous system
Cognitive reframing between intimate moments:
- Journal specific relational strengths that exist in your marriage and that no screen interaction could replicate
- Remind yourself that pixels cannot offer history, conversation, or the life you’ve built together
- Work with a therapist on processing the negative feelings and anger that surface during recovery
The recovering partner plays an active role in partner healing through consistent validation. This means regularly expressing specific and honoring appreciation for their spouse’s person and physicality without waiting to be asked, maintaining eye contact during intimacy to affirm presence, and creating opportunities for open conversation about how the process is progressing.
Creating a Fantasy-Free ZoneMarital intimacy during recovery requires explicit boundaries around mental activity, not just physical behavior.
For the recovering partner, this means developing tools to redirect attention when mental triggers arise. The brain doesn’t forget pornographic imagery immediately—recovery involves building new neural pathways rather than erasing old patterns. When addictive fantasy surfaces during intimacy:
- Immediately redirect focus to a physical sensation—the texture of your spouse’s skin, their temperature
- Verbally check in with your partner (“I’m here with you”)
- Open your eyes and establish eye contact to anchor yourself in the real relationship
- If the intrusion persists, acknowledge it honestly rather than pretending it didn’t happen
For both partners, establishing what constitutes the “fantasy-free zone” provides clear expectations. This typically includes no pornography use, no fantasy about anyone other than your spouse, and immediate disclosure if either occurs. The goal isn’t perfection but transparency that allows trust to rebuild incrementally.
These emotional and psychological tools create the safety necessary for the practical exercises that follow.
Practical Steps for Rebuilding Physical IntimacyThe gradual approach to restoring physical intimacy prioritizes emotional safety and present-moment connection over sexual performance. This process requires patience, as dopamine baselines typically take 3-6 months to normalize after sustained pornography use, and rushing leads to setbacks for both partners.
Rebuilding the relationship during recovery also involves spending quality time together and creating new memories. Couples may even find it helpful to engage in a new hobby or interest together, which can strengthen their bond and support the healing process.
Sensate Focus: Non-Goal Oriented TouchSensate Focus is a structured touch protocol developed by sex therapists William Masters and Virginia Johnson specifically to address sexual dysfunction and disconnection. In the context of porn addiction recovery, it serves a particular purpose: rewiring the recovering partner’s arousal template away from screen novelty toward spousal touch, while providing the betrayed partner with experiences of safe, non-demanding physical connection.
The key principle is removing all pressure for sexual performance or orgasm. Touch exists for its own sake—to rebuild comfort with physical closeness and to practice staying present in the body.
Step 1: Non-sexual touching with clothes on
- Schedule 20-minute sessions, 2-3 times per week
- One partner touches while the other receives, then switch
- Focus on non-erogenous areas: arms, back, hands, feet
- The receiving partner verbalizes sensations: “That feels warm,” “The pressure there is relaxing”
- No genital touching, no kissing, no expectation of arousal
Step 2: Non-sexual skin-to-skin contact
- Progress to touch without clothes, still avoiding breasts and genitals
- Continue the focus on sensation awareness and verbalization
- Both partners practice staying present—if minds wander to fantasy or trauma, gently return focus to physical sensation
- Maintain eye contact periodically to reinforce connection with your actual partner
Step 3: Gradual inclusion of more intimate touch
- Slowly incorporate more sensitive areas, still without pressure for intercourse
- Communication increases: “Is this okay?” “I’d like to try…”
- If either partner feels triggered or disconnected, pause without shame
- The goal remains presence and connection, not orgasm
Step 4: Integration of sexual intimacy
- When both partners feel ready, integrate sexual touch while maintaining the focus on presence and communication
- Continue verbal check-ins during intimacy
- After, discuss the experience—what created connection, what was difficult
Clinical reports from couples using this progression show 70-80% improvement in presence and satisfaction, typically over 4-6 weeks of consistent practice.
Communication Techniques for IntimacyThe way couples talk about their intimate life during recovery either creates safety or reinforces pain. The following comparison illustrates healing versus harmful communication patterns:
| Communication Type | Healing Approach | Harmful Approach | | --- | --- | --- | | Expressing needs | “I feel safe when you maintain eye contact during intimacy” | “You never pay attention to me” | | Addressing triggers | “I’m feeling triggered right now, can we pause and breathe together?” | Silent withdrawal or pushing through despite distress | | Celebrating progress | “I felt really connected during our time together last night” | Focusing only on what’s still broken | | Discussing fears | “I worry about being compared, can we talk about this?” | Accusatory interrogation or refusing to discuss | | Acknowledging setbacks | “I had intrusive thoughts but redirected—I want you to know” | Hiding struggles to avoid partner’s reaction |
This communication pattern establishes what therapists call “emotional safety first”—the recognition that honest communication must precede physical vulnerability. Many couples find that regular exercise of these communication skills outside the bedroom makes them more natural during intimate moments.
The path from broken trust to restored intimacy inevitably includes obstacles, which the next section addresses directly.
Mindfulness and Presence in IntimacyMindfulness and presence are powerful tools for couples working to restore intimacy after pornography addiction. When individuals practice mindfulness, they learn to stay grounded in the present moment, which is essential for breaking free from old patterns of dissociation and anxiety that often accompany addiction. Mindfulness helps both partners focus on their genuine feelings and sensations during intimate moments, rather than being overwhelmed by negative feelings or memories of past betrayals.
Simple mindfulness exercises in anticipation of sexual intercourse—such as deep breathing, guided meditation, or even taking a few moments to notice physical sensations—can help reduce anxiety and foster a sense of safety and connection. Regular exercise and self care routines also play a crucial role in supporting emotional well-being and strengthening the relationship. By intentionally letting go of negative feelings tied to past experiences with pornography, couples can create space for new, positive experiences of intimacy. Over time, these mindful practices help restore intimacy, allowing both partners to feel more connected, valued, and present with each other.
Digital Safety and BoundariesEstablishing clear digital safety measures and boundaries is a critical step in the recovery process from pornography addiction. Creating a plan to avoid triggers and prevent relapse can include practical steps like installing website blockers, limiting social media use, and setting specific guidelines around technology in the home. Couples can work together to define these boundaries, ensuring that both partners feel safe and supported as they rebuild intimacy.
Educating yourself about the risks and consequences of pornography addiction, as well as developing digital literacy, empowers you to make informed choices about your online behavior. Regular check-ins, accountability partners, and ongoing therapy sessions can help maintain these boundaries and provide support when challenges arise. By prioritizing digital safety and maintaining open communication, couples can reduce the risk of relapse and focus on healing and restoring intimacy in their relationship. This proactive approach not only supports recovery, but also strengthens the trust and connection that are essential for long-term healing.
Common Challenges and SolutionsSetbacks and difficulties are normal in intimacy recovery—expecting a linear path leads to discouragement when reality proves messier. It is important for the betrayed partner to remember that they should not blame themselves for their spouse’s addiction; it is not their fault. Porn addiction is usually a dysfunctional coping mechanism, not a reflection of the partner’s worth or attractiveness.
Recovering Partner Drifting to Digital Fantasies During IntimacyThe brain’s dopamine pathways don’t reset instantly, and mental drift toward pornographic imagery may occur even during genuine efforts at connection. This doesn’t indicate failure but rather the need for continued practice.
Grounding techniques for the recovering partner:
- Focus on five senses: What do you see (your spouse’s face), hear (their breathing), smell, taste, feel?
- Breathing exercises: Slow, deep breaths activate the parasympathetic nervous system and interrupt the anxiety that often triggers fantasy
- Open your eyes and look at your actual partner—this simple action often breaks the mental drift
Accountability strategy: Agree in advance that if the recovering partner experiences persistent intrusive fantasies, they will acknowledge it honestly either during or after intimacy. This honesty, while difficult, builds trust over time and allows the couple to address patterns together. A therapist can also provide a place to debrief and disarm these triggers and fantasies so that you can be more present during intercourse.
Betrayed Partner Experiencing Intrusive Traumatic ImagesThe partner’s trauma response may surface during intimacy as vivid, unwanted images. This is a betrayal trauma symptom, not a choice or weakness. If the response is anything more than a moment, it can be helpful to pause and agree to come back to intimacy at a time when you’re feeling more grounded. If your nervous system stays activated even after stopping, you might consider trying one of these trauma-informed approaches:
- STOP technique: Stop the activity, Take a breath, Observe what you’re feeling without judgment, Proceed mindfully
- Bilateral stimulation: Crossing arms and alternating tapping on shoulders can help regulate the nervous system during triggered states
- Partner reassurance protocols: Agree on specific phrases the recovering partner can say when the betrayed partner is triggered—“I’m here with you, not anywhere else”
When professional help is necessary: If intrusive imagery persists despite self-help efforts, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), brainspotting or somatic therapy with one of our trauma-trained therapists is often essential. This isn’t a failure of the marriage’s healing process—it’s recognition that some wounds require specialized treatment.
Timeline Expectations and PressureUnrealistic expectations for recovery speed create pressure that undermines the entire process. Some couples expect intimacy to normalize within weeks; when it doesn’t, they interpret this as evidence that restoration is impossible.
Realistic timeline framework:
- Initial sobriety stabilization: 90+ days
- Beginning Sensate Focus exercises: typically after 3-4 months of demonstrated sobriety
- Gradual integration of sexual intimacy: 4-8 months into recovery for many couples
- Feeling “normal” again: often 1-2 years of consistent work
These timelines vary based on addiction severity, presence of other issues (distorted beliefs about sexuality, underlying anxiety or depression), and the quality of support. Long term recovery means accepting that rebuilding intimacy is not a destination but an ongoing journey.
The betrayed partner’s healing pace matters as much as the recovering partner’s sobriety. Rushing physical intimacy to “prove” the marriage is healed can harm one or both partners in the long run. Personal growth for both individuals, through self care practices, therapy, and support groups, contributes to the marriage’s restoration.
Conclusion and Next StepsRebuilding intimacy after pornography addiction requires patience, presence, and typically professional support. The journey from broken trust to restored physical connection involves both partners doing individual work—the recovering spouse maintaining sobriety and learning to stay present, the betrayed spouse processing trauma and learning to feel safe again—while simultaneously building new patterns of connection together.
The re-humanization of sex after porn addiction means moving from a model of control and novelty to one of mutual vulnerability and embodied presence. As we mentioned at the start, it is a shift from intensity to real intimacy. This is difficult work, but many couples report that their intimacy after recovery surpasses what existed before the addiction was discovered—not despite the pain but because the healing process required levels of honest communication and intentionality that many marriages never achieve.
Immediate actionable steps:
- Schedule individual therapy for both partners—addiction-focused for the recovering spouse, trauma-informed for the betrayed spouse
- Begin daily check-ins (5-10 minutes) to discuss emotional states without agenda
- Practice grounding exercises individually before attempting to use them during intimacy
- Establish clear guidelines around disclosing slips and relapses
- Utilize couples therapy to address how personal trauma and relationship dynamics are impacting your intimacy
The journey of healing after porn addiction is difficult, but it is not impossible. With the right strategies, professional support, and commitment from both partners, marriage can become a relationship characterized by genuine presence, mutual respect, and restored intimacy.
Formal disclosure for pornography addiction is a structured, therapist-guided process where the addicted partner provides a complete, truthful account of their pornography use and related behaviors to their betrayed partner. This clinical intervention aims to end secrecy, establish shared reality, and create the foundation for relational healing—all without causing additional trauma through graphic or unnecessary details.
https://youtu.be/SVV6L7gUnF4
It is essential to work with professionals, such as therapists or counselors, during the disclosure and recovery process. Professionals provide guidance, support, and accountability, helping both partners navigate the complexities of addiction and betrayal trauma.
This article covers creating and using a comprehensive disclosure checklist specifically for pornography addiction. While many resources address sex addiction broadly, this guide focuses exclusively on the narrower but deeply painful reality of digital betrayal through compulsive pornography consumption. The target audience includes couples navigating addiction and betrayal trauma, betrayed partners seeking complete truth, recovering addicts preparing for therapeutic disclosure, and therapists guiding the process.
We also recognize that in many cases, informal disclosure will suffice. If the couple is able to overcome the relational injury and connect on the basis of renewed trust and authentic intimacy, then this formal step is not needed. However, other couples will discover that a formal disclosure for pornography addiction sets a new baseline for truth in the relationship recovery process and this can be a cornerstone for renewed investment into the relationship.
A formal disclosure checklist should include: a timeline of pornography use, financial expenditures on paid content, secret accounts and burner profiles, escalation patterns over time, and locations where consumption occurred—all described factually and categorically rather than with graphic details that serve no healing purpose.
By the end of this guide, you will understand:
- What information belongs in a disclosure (and what doesn’t)
- How to protect against trickle-truth that resets the trauma clock
- The critical role of separate therapists for each partner
- Practical steps for facilitating genuine recovery and partner healing
Understanding Formal Disclosure for Pornography AddictionFormal disclosure is a guided therapeutic process that stands apart from spontaneous confessions, casual admissions, or the devastating pattern of revealing information piece by piece. It represents a one-time, comprehensive revelation prepared with professional oversight to restore emotional safety and dignity to the betrayed partner.
In the context of pornography addiction, this process has been adapted from broader betrayal trauma models developed by experts like Patrick Carnes in the 1990s and 2000s who developed a high-structured process for sex addiction recovery.
The recovery process also involves understanding the stages of addiction recovery and managing expectations about progress, as setbacks are a normal part of healing.
Why Formal Disclosure MattersThe most critical function of formal disclosure is eliminating trickle-truth—the incremental revealing of addiction details over time. When partners receive information in fragments, each new revelation resets the trauma clock, prolonging hypervigilance and eroding any sense of safety being rebuilt. Research from community forums indicates that 78% of betrayed partners cite trickle-truth as their primary barrier to reconciliation.
Formal disclosure provides the complete picture necessary for informed decisions about the relationship’s future. Without full information, partners cannot genuinely consent to staying or evaluate whether real change is possible. This process creates the accountability and transparency foundation essential for any meaningful recovery process. The process of formal disclosure is the first step to rebuild trust.
The alternative—continued deception or partial honesty—mimics the original betrayal and makes genuine healing impossible. Partners report that the lies surrounding pornography addiction often cause more harm than the behavior itself, which is why structured truth-telling becomes the necessary starting point for rebuilding trust. Without full disclosure, partners may feel as though they are living in the dark, leading to ongoing anxiety, fact-finding efforts, and an inability to trust.
The Role of Specialized TherapistsEffective formal disclosure requires separate therapists working with each partner. It is essential to seek guidance from professionals, such as Certified Sex Addiction Therapists (CSAT), during the disclosure process to ensure safety and support for both individuals. The recovering porn addict works exclusively with their own therapist—ideally a CSAT or someone supervised by a CSAT—to draft the disclosure document. This professional ensures the addict has achieved adequate sobriety (typically 90+ days) and helps them prepare a complete, appropriately detailed document.
The betrayed partner simultaneously engages a different therapist specializing in betrayal trauma and partner healing. These therapists are specially trained to guide partners through the recovery process, providing a trauma-informed approach that addresses the unique emotional fallout experienced by partners of porn addicts. This separation prevents codependency dynamics, untangles trauma bonding, protects against manipulation, and allows each person to process their experience without compromise. The partner’s therapist prepares them for receiving the disclosure and creates a safety plan for the immediate aftermath.
Our therapists help both partners in a relationship navigate the complexities of recovery from porn addiction, hold the porn addict accountable for their actions, and provide guidance on the stages of recovery and managing expectations. We understand pornography addiction and recognize its unique digital dimensions—the secret browser histories, incognito modes, burner accounts, and financial deception that characterize modern pornography compulsion. This specialized knowledge ensures the disclosure covers all relevant territory without veering into traumatic imagery that serves no therapeutic purpose.
Signs and Symptoms of Pornography AddictionPornography addiction, sometimes referred to as compulsive sexual behavior or porn addiction, is more than just frequent viewing of explicit material—it’s a pattern of sexual behavior that begins to disrupt a person’s well being, daily life, and relationships. While some people may watch porn occasionally without significant consequences, addiction develops when use becomes excessive, secretive, and difficult to control, leading to real harm for both the individual and those around them.
Common signs and symptoms of pornography addiction include:
- Loss of control: Repeated unsuccessful attempts to cut back or stop watching porn, even when wanting to quit.
- Escalation: Needing to view more extreme or novel content over time to achieve the same effect, or spending increasing amounts of time on pornography.
- Preoccupation: Persistent thoughts about pornography or sexual behavior that interfere with work, school, or personal responsibilities.
- Neglecting responsibilities: Skipping important tasks, social events, or family time in order to watch porn.
- Relationship problems: Increased secrecy, lying, or withdrawal from a partner, as well as decreased real life intimacy or sexual dysfunction (like porn-induced erectile dysfunction, PIED).
- Emotional distress: Feelings of shame, guilt, anxiety, or depression related to pornography use, often leading to further isolation.
- Negative impact on well being: Sleep disturbances, loss of interest in other activities, and a decline in overall quality of life.
- Continued use despite consequences: Persisting in the behavior even after experiencing negative effects on relationships, work, or self worth.
These symptoms can gradually erode trust, create emotional distance, and cause significant harm to both the person struggling with addiction and their loved ones. Recognizing the signs of pornography addiction is a crucial first step toward seeking help, setting healthy boundaries, and beginning the recovery process. If you or someone you care about is experiencing these challenges, reach out to us or consider joining a support group that can provide the guidance and support needed to start healing.
Information for Agency vs. Traumatic Imagery: What to Include and AvoidThe strategic distinction between helpful information and retraumatizing details determines whether disclosure supports healing or causes additional harm. Understanding this boundary is essential for every person involved in the process.
Information for agency empowers the betrayed partner to understand what happened, make informed decisions, and begin processing the reality of the addiction. Traumatic imagery replays addiction content in the partner’s mind, triggering PTSD-like responses and embedding fresh visual scars that complicate the healing process rather than supporting it.
Information for Agency (What to Include)The sexual timeline forms the core of effective disclosure, capturing the ebb and flow of pornography consumption, masturbation, and fantasy over months or years. This timeline should be plotted chronologically to show escalation patterns—for example, starting with occasional viewing in 2018, progressing to daily sessions by 2020, peaking during stress periods like job loss, and showing any attempts at recovery. It should show the problem starting before the relationship began (as is almost always the case) to help the betrayed partner understand that the problematic pornography consumption is not their fault, but something the porn addict brought to the marriage.
Essential elements include:
- Timeline and frequency patterns: When watching porn began, how often it occurred during different life periods, and what triggered increased use
- Escalation progression: Movement from free content to paid subscriptions, from occasional viewing to compulsive daily behavior, or shifts into more extreme categories
- Financial expenditures: Total money spent on premium sites, subscriptions, interactive services, or related content
- Locations and devices: Where consumption happened—home computer, work device, phone in the bathroom, hotel rooms during travel—providing the full picture of deception
- Secret accounts: Burner email addresses, hidden social media profiles, dating app accounts, or alternative payment methods like cryptocurrency
- Categories consumed: General types of content viewed (amateur, professional, interactive) described categorically rather than graphically
- Cloaking behaviors: How the addiction and its behaviors were kept hidden from the partner. Lies that were told, half-truths, efforts to conceal problematic porn use and masturbation
This information dismantles the addict’s lies and deception through factual reconstruction. It allows the partner to process patterns, understand the scope of betrayal, and make informed choices about their own life—this is the foundation of agency.
Traumatic Imagery (What to Avoid)Disclosure should never include graphic descriptions that transfer pornographic content into the betrayed partner’s mind. These details serve the addict’s shame-minimization rather than partner empowerment, and research consistently shows they intensify anxiety and complicate recovery.
What to exclude:
- Specific names of performers, websites, or video titles
- Detailed descriptions of acts watched or fantasized about
- Fantasy storylines or scenarios that played in the addict’s mind
- Visual evidence, screenshots, or saved content
- Any information requiring the partner to visualize specific pornographic scenes
The distinction is straightforward: “I spent approximately $2,300 on VR pornography subscriptions over two years, typically viewing in the basement after midnight” provides necessary information. Describing what those videos depicted does not serve healing and creates new trauma.
Partners frequently ask detailed questions in the immediate aftermath of discovery, driven by shock and the desperate need to understand. However, providing graphic answers rarely satisfies this need and typically creates intrusive images that persist for months or years. Our therapists help both partners understand that some questions, while understandable, don’t have answers that aid recovery.
Complete Formal Disclosure ChecklistThis comprehensive framework organizes disclosure by categories, ensuring thorough coverage while maintaining appropriate boundaries. Each section focuses on factual information that empowers informed decision-making without veering into traumatic territory.
Timeline and Frequency DisclosureDocumenting the progression of pornography addiction reveals patterns essential for both understanding the past and preventing future relapse. This section should cover:
- Origin point: When pornography use began, including any childhood or adolescent exposure that preceded adult compulsion
- Major escalation points: Specific periods when consumption increased significantly, often correlating with life stressors, relationship changes, or emotional difficulties
- Frequency patterns: Honest accounting of how often viewing occurred during different life phases (e.g., “2-3 times weekly in 2019, escalating to daily sessions of 1-2 hours by 2021”)
- Attempted stopping: Any periods of reduced use or abstinence, what motivated those attempts, and what triggered return to the behavior
- Stress correlation: How anxiety, work pressure, relationship conflict, or other difficulties influenced consumption patterns
Many men struggling with pornography addiction minimize duration and frequency. Working with a therapist helps overcome this tendency toward minimization and ensures the timeline reflects reality rather than a sanitized version designed to reduce consequences.
Financial and Digital DisclosureThe financial footprint of pornography addiction often shocks betrayed partners, representing both direct harm to the relationship and evidence of sustained deception. This section covers:
- Direct spending: Total amounts on paid sites, premium subscriptions, cam services, or content creator platforms—organized by approximate time period
- Payment concealment: Methods used to hide spending, including separate credit cards, cash withdrawals, cryptocurrency, or disguised transactions
- Burner accounts: Email addresses created specifically for pornography access, registered accounts on sites, or profiles under false names
- Secret social media: Hidden profiles on platforms, even if ostensibly non-pornographic, used to conceal behavior or maintain double lives
- Interactive elements: Any direct communication with performers through cam sites, messaging, or other platforms—focusing on the fact and nature of interaction rather than content
This level of specificity helps ensure nothing significant is omitted.
Behavioral Patterns and LocationsUnderstanding the behavioral architecture of addiction provides insight into deception patterns and helps establish healthy boundaries for recovery:
- Primary consumption locations: Every place where viewing occurred—home, work, vehicles, hotels, other people’s homes
- Device usage: All devices used, including work computers, tablets, gaming systems, and phones
- Timing patterns: Times of day when consumption typically happened and what routines surrounded it
- Category progression: General types of content consumed over time, described categorically (e.g., “progressed from mainstream content to more extreme categories including violent themes”)
- Real-world spillover: Any ways pornography consumption influenced real life intimacy, including decreased interest in partner, requests influenced by content, or sexual dysfunction
This information helps partners understand the full scope of the secret life that existed alongside their relationship. It also provides essential data for establishing boundaries and accountability structures during recovery.
The Role of FantasyAgain, describing the details of fantasy is only going to traumatize your partner. However, it can be helpful to disclose:
- History of fantasy: When it started, even with non-sexual fantasies during childhood
- Frequency over time: How often was fantasy part of your experience?
- Relationship to masturbation: describe what percentage of your masturbation occurrences was derived from fantasy versus pornography consumption
Focus on actions, not thoughts and also try to differentiate between fantasy that is romanticized versus fantasy that is sexualized.
Common Challenges and SolutionsSeveral predictable obstacles emerge during the disclosure process. Addressing these proactively increases the likelihood of successful navigation and genuine healing. Anger is a normal emotional response to betrayal and should be addressed as part of the healing process. Trauma bonding can complicate recovery, making it difficult for partners to break unhealthy relational patterns. It is important to set boundaries to protect emotional and physical well-being during recovery. Progress in recovery is not always linear, and setbacks are a normal part of the process. Effective recovery plans should address compulsive use, emotional pain, and moral incongruence. Compulsive use of pornography often leads to neglecting responsibilities and routines, and using pornography as an emotional crutch indicates a shift from entertainment to coping mechanism. Decreased satisfaction with real-life partners and physical symptoms like porn-induced erectile dysfunction and sleep disruption can result from pornography addiction.
Trickle-Truth and Partial DisclosureTrickle-truth is perhaps the most damaging pattern in pornography addiction recovery. Each new revelation—first admitting to “occasional viewing,” later acknowledging burner accounts, eventually revealing thousands in hidden spending—resets the trauma clock and reactivates grief for the betrayed partner.
Research suggests each trickle-truth event adds 3-6 months to emotional stabilization. Partners report 2-5 year delays in healing when information emerges incrementally rather than comprehensively. The psychological impact mimics the original deception, teaching the betrayed partner that safety remains impossible.
The solution is complete disclosure in a single therapeutic setting. Working extensively with a therapist before the disclosure session ensures the addict has examined every corner of their behavior. Many addicts genuinely believe they’ve shared “everything” only to remember additional details later due to splitting—thorough preparation with professional guidance minimizes this risk.
If new information does emerge after formal disclosure, it should be addressed immediately rather than concealed, but the goal must be making this unnecessary through comprehensive initial disclosure.
Shame and Minimization by the AddictShame drives both the addiction itself and the continued hiding that damages relationships. Porn addicts often convince themselves they’re protecting their partner by withholding information, when in reality they’re protecting themselves from facing consequences and the partner’s pain.
Practical ways to address this:
- Work with a therapist over multiple sessions before disclosure, examining every aspect of the behavior without judgment
- Recognize that shame about disclosure often exceeds shame about the actual behavior—and that this is backwards
- Understand that incomplete disclosure causes far more harm than the difficult truth
- Use self compassion appropriately: shame should motivate complete honesty, not continued hiding
The therapist’s role includes helping the addict distinguish between genuine partner protection and self-protection disguised as care. This hard work during preparation determines whether disclosure succeeds or merely becomes another form of deception.
Overwhelm and Trauma Response in Betrayed PartnerThe betrayed partner will likely experience intense emotional responses during and after disclosure. This is normal and expected—the information being shared represents profound betrayal, and the body and mind respond accordingly. Facing heartbreak is a central part of this process, and including family or partner support can be crucial for emotional recovery and relational healing, as highlighted in research co-authored by Stefanie Carnes. The first 72 hours after discovering infidelity are especially important for stabilizing emotions and preparing for an honest disclosure.
Creating a supportive environment includes:
- Ensuring the partner’s separate therapist is available immediately before and after the disclosure session
- Developing a safety plan for the hours and days following disclosure, including where the partner will stay, who they might call, and what self care activities are available
- Recognizing that disclosure is the beginning of the healing process, not its endpoint
- Planning specific tasks for the immediate aftermath that provide structure without requiring major decisions
Many betrayed partners initially feel unsafe and may need physical separation from the addict following disclosure. This should be planned for rather than treated as failure. The support system around the betrayed partner—whether trusted loved ones, a support group, or professional help—proves essential during this acute phase.
Conclusion and Next StepsFormal disclosure represents the foundation for potential healing and recovery from pornography addiction. It transforms the digital deception that characterized the addiction into relational truth, providing the betrayed partner with full information and the recovering addict with genuine accountability.
This process is hard work that requires professional guidance, thorough preparation, and commitment from both partners. It is not punishment—it is the necessary starting point for any authentic recovery process.
Immediate next steps:
- Book a consultation with one of our specialized therapists: one for the recovering porn addict, and a separate one for the betrayed partner specializing in betrayal trauma
- Prepare the comprehensive checklist: work with the therapist to document timeline, financial impact, digital footprint, and behavioral patterns
- Schedule the disclosure session: plan for adequate time, appropriate setting, and post-disclosure support
Following disclosure, related recovery topics include establishing healthy boundaries, boundary setting for technology use, rebuilding trust through consistent behavior change, and ongoing accountability measures. The healing process extends well beyond the disclosure itself, requiring sustained focus on honesty and relationship recovery.
Forgiveness and healing betrayal trauma are not the same process—and confusing them keeps betrayed partners stuck in pain, wondering why they still feel triggered despite genuinely wanting to move forward. The distinction matters because your brain processes betrayal as a survival threat, and no amount of willpower or spiritual intention can override neurobiology.
https://youtu.be/Q40fUWq0pYk
The initial discovery of betrayal often leads to shock, disbelief, and emotional dysregulation characterized by intense emotional turmoil. Betrayal trauma can disrupt your entire sense of life and reality, making it difficult to reconnect with relationships or see the bigger picture beyond the pain.
This article is for individuals experiencing betrayal trauma who feel pressured to forgive quickly, or who have already offered forgiveness yet continue to struggle with intense feelings, triggers, and emotional dysregulation. We’ll explore why healing must come before forgiveness, what’s actually happening in your brain, and how to honor your own pace on this personal journey.
Here’s the direct answer: Healing must precede genuine forgiveness because the amygdala doesn’t have a “forgiveness button.” Betrayal trauma rewires your nervous system, and recovery requires bottom-up healing—addressing survival responses before rational thoughts about forgiveness can take root.
By the end of this article, you will:
- Understand why forgiveness doesn’t stop triggered reactions
- Recognize where you are in the healing process
- Learn why premature forgiveness often backfires
- Discover the stages of authentic trauma recovery
- Know when and how forgiveness becomes possible—not mandatory
Understanding Betrayal Trauma vs ForgivenessBetrayal trauma is a neurobiological response to a profound violation of safety and trust within a relationship. When someone you deeply trusted—your partner, a family member, or another close person—commits an intentional act of betrayal, your brain registers it as a survival threat. This isn’t weakness or overreaction; it’s biology. It is a hard-wired response to your safe environment being shattered by another person’s actions.
Explicit Definitions and DistinctionsIt’s crucial to distinguish between forgiveness and healing:
- Forgiveness is often directed toward the perpetrator, while healing is directed inward to restore oneself.
- Forgiveness represents an intentional choice and emotional shift regarding the betrayer, while healing is a gradual journey centered on the survivor’s recovery from a relational wound.
- Healing is the comprehensive process of addressing emotional, psychological, and physical trauma and rebuilding trust in oneself.
- Put another way, healing addresses the biological rewiring of the brain, while forgiveness addresses the grudge.
The distinction between trauma and the decision to forgive is crucial: one is what happened to your nervous system, and the other is a personal choice you can eventually make. Forgiveness does not mean condoning or excusing bad behavior, nor does it remove the responsibility of the person who committed the betrayal to be accountable for their actions. They operate on completely different timelines and require different interventions.
What Betrayal Trauma Does to Your BrainWhen betrayal occurs, your amygdala—the brain’s threat-detection center—activates your fight-flight-freeze response. This is automatic and operates below conscious awareness. Your brain shifts into survival mode, flooding your system with stress hormones and creating hypervigilance to prevent future harm.
Trauma memories are stored differently than regular memories. Instead of being processed and filed away as “past events,” they remain fragmented and easily triggered. A song, a location, a certain tone of voice—any sensory reminder can activate the trauma response so it feels as if the betrayal is reoccurring right now. This explains why rational thoughts like “I should forgive” or “That was six months ago” don’t stop the emotional and physical reactions.
Your brain is doing exactly what it’s designed to do: protect you from a threat. The problem is it believes the threat is still present even long after the acting-out behaviors have stopped. Understanding this reality is the first step toward self-compassion in your healing journey.
What Forgiveness Actually Is (And Isn’t)Forgiveness is an internal, unilateral process of releasing resentment and anger for your own well being. It’s a personal choice and emotional exchange that can free you from the festering pain of victimhood. When it emerges authentically—in its own time—genuine forgiveness has been linked to lower stress, reduced depression, and improved emotional regulation. An important part of the healing process is self forgiveness, which involves letting go of guilt, resentment, or shame you may hold against yourself for being blindsided by the betrayal. This gradual process is essential for emotional healing and moving forward after infidelity or other kinds of betrayal.
We do assert that forgiveness is important, but we also recognize it has limitations. Here’s what forgiveness does not do:
- Heal trauma: Forgiving doesn’t reset your nervous system or stop triggers
- Restore trust: Rebuilding trust requires observable change from the person who betrayed you
- Erase consequences: The wrongdoer remains responsible for their actions
- Require reconciliation: You can forgive someone while maintaining clear boundaries or ending the relationship
- Mean condoning: Forgiveness involves honest reckoning with the hurt caused, not minimizing it
- Mean forgetting: Forgiveness is not about forgetting the betrayal.
- Free the other person: Forgiveness is about freeing yourself from resentment and pain, reclaiming your power and control over your emotional life.
Forgiveness and accountability coexist. Choosing to release resentment doesn’t mean pretending the betrayal didn’t happen or that consequences shouldn’t follow. The words we use in our internal dialogue—how we talk to ourselves about forgiveness and healing—play a powerful role in shaping our emotional state and personal growth.
The Bottom-Up Healing FrameworkHealing from betrayal trauma must address the brain from the bottom up—starting with survival responses before working toward rational thought and decisions like forgiveness. A key component of this healing framework is the use of emotional regulation techniques to manage intense emotions and regain a sense of control after betrayal. This is the fundamental principle that explains why “just forgive and move on” fails so spectacularly.
Think of it like a broken bone: forgiving the person who tripped you doesn’t instantly set the bone, eliminate pain, or restore function. You need medical intervention, time, and rehabilitation. Your nervous system works the same way after betrayal. The forgiveness decision exists at the top of your brain (prefrontal cortex), but the trauma lives in the bottom (brainstem and limbic system). Healing must proceed upward.
Stage 1: Safety and StabilizationBefore any forgiveness work can happen, your nervous system needs to feel safe. The first stage of healing from betrayal trauma focuses on creating a sense of safety and stability. This stage emphasizes regulating your body’s stress response and establishing both physical and emotional safety to lay the foundation for recovery.
During stabilization, you’re learning to:
- Recognize when you’re triggered and what activates your stress response
- Use grounding techniques to return to the present moment
- Create a safe environment where you can process emotions without judgment
- Build routines that support your mental health
- Establish clear boundaries that are crucial for creating a safe environment for healing
- Practice open communication to foster honesty and emotional safety between partners
Attempting to forgive during this stage is like trying to run on a broken leg. It’s not only ineffective—it can cause additional harm. Your brain cannot process forgiveness while it’s still in survival mode.
Stage 2: Processing and IntegrationOnce your nervous system has stabilized, the real healing work begins. Trauma memories need to be processed through your body and emotions—not just talked about intellectually. This is where grief and mourning become essential.
You’re grieving real losses: the partner you thought you had, the relationship you believed in, the future you’d imagined, the sense of safety you’d taken for granted. The process of mourning after betrayal involves recognizing both tangible and intangible losses, such as the loss of trust and shared values.
It’s important to:
- Acknowledge and validate the intense feelings that arise during this time—including sadness, which is a valid and enduring part of the healing process.
- Recognize that these intangible losses are profound, and mourning them is a vital part of moving forward.
Rushing to forgive during this stage interrupts necessary processing. Research shows that people who try to forgive before emotional processing is complete often get stuck in cycles of rumination rather than liberation. The pain doesn’t disappear—it goes underground and resurfaces as resentment, mistrust, or emotional numbness.
Stage 3: Reconnection and GrowthIn this stage, something shifts. Having processed the trauma and mourned the losses, you begin to reconnect—with yourself, with hope, and with the possibility of a future that includes peace rather than constant pain. This is also a time to reconnect with relationships and the broader world, recognizing that while bad things happen, the world and life itself are not inherently bad. Broadening your perspective in this way is crucial for moving forward and finding post-traumatic growth.
Key aspects of this stage include:
- Reconnecting with yourself and your sense of hope
- Rebuilding relationships and trust, if desired, on new terms
- Appreciating both the small and big things in life as part of the healing and growth process
- Establishing new routines and boundaries for a fresh foundation
- Experiencing personal growth, resilience, and a deeper sense of self
Here’s the remarkable thing: genuine forgiveness often emerges naturally at this stage. It’s not forced or pressured; it arises from a place of strength rather than desperation. You’re no longer forgiving because you should or because someone told you to. You’re choosing it—or not—from a position of empowerment.
This stage also offers the opportunity to build a new relationship with your partner, one based on mutual understanding, transparency, and shared goals. Together, you can establish new routines and boundaries, creating a fresh foundation for your connection. Appreciating both the small and big things in life becomes part of the healing and growth process, helping you rebalance after emotional trauma.
Personal growth becomes possible. The journey of healing from betrayal trauma can lead to resilience and a deeper sense of self. Some people describe this as post-traumatic growth: emerging from the healing process with greater clarity, stronger boundaries, and a deeper understanding of themselves. Forgiveness becomes a genuine option, not an obligation.
Why “Just Forgive” Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience“Why do I still feel triggered even after I’ve forgiven my spouse?”
This is one of the most common questions betrayed partners ask, and the answer lies in understanding how different parts of your brain process betrayal versus forgiveness.
The emotional pain from betrayal often engenders a sense of utter powerlessness, which complicates the healing process. Even if you choose to forgive, your brain may still react to reminders of the betrayal. That’s because forgiveness is a personal process that often unfolds naturally as you heal, rather than something to be forced. It’s important to focus on your own well-being and emotional recovery from trauma, rather than assuming forgiveness is the only road to healing from trauma.
The Amygdala Hijack PhenomenonWhen you encounter a trigger—a place, a name, a time of day associated with the betrayal—your amygdala activates before your conscious mind can intervene. This “amygdala hijack” happens in milliseconds, flooding your system with stress hormones and activating survival responses.
Your decision to forgive lives in your prefrontal cortex—the rational, thinking part of your brain. But your trauma response bypasses this area entirely. The amygdala literally cannot receive the message that you’ve forgiven because that’s not how threat detection works.
This is why willpower fails. You can genuinely mean it when you say “I forgive you,” and your body will still react with confusion, doubt, anger, or fear when triggered. You haven’t failed at forgiveness—your brain is simply doing its job of protecting you from perceived threats.
Healing vs Forgiveness TimelineUnderstanding the different timelines helps normalize your experience:
Comparison Table: Healing Process vs. Premature Forgiveness Attempt
| Phase | Healing Process | Premature Forgiveness Attempt | | --- | --- | --- | | Early (0-6 months) | Safety and stabilization; high triggers | Forgiveness feels impossible or forced; often leads to self blame, may be a fawn response | | Middle (6-18 months) | Processing grief; emotions intensify before improving | Forgiveness may be offered but doesn’t reduce triggers; confusion increases | | Later (18+ months) | Integration; triggers decrease; agency returns | Genuine forgiveness becomes possible; emerges from strength | | Ongoing | Maintenance; occasional triggers; continued growth | Forgiveness feels authentic; coexists with healthy boundaries |
The timeline varies for each person. Healing from betrayal often takes years (especially without counseling help), not months, and it is important to remember that healing from betrayal trauma is not a linear process. Developing the ability to create a safe emotional environment and rebuild trust over time is crucial for recovery. Expecting to forgive quickly—or pressuring yourself to do so—typically leads to re-traumatization rather than peace.
The Integration ProcessProfessional help from trauma-informed therapists accelerates healing because they understand the bottom-up framework. Rather than starting with “Have you considered forgiving your spouse?”, specialized betrayal trauma therapy addresses nervous system regulation first.
Effective therapy helps you:
- Process trauma memories so they lose their emotional charge
- Develop new neural pathways that support emotional well being
- Build skills for managing triggers when they occur
- Explore what forgiveness means to you—on your own terms
This integration process honors the reality of your pain while creating space for healing. It’s not a shortcut; it’s the path that actually works.
Common Challenges and SolutionsHealing happens within a social context, and external pressure can complicate an already difficult personal journey. Accepting that bad things happen in life is an important step in the healing process, as it helps reframe your perception and fosters growth. Friends and family play a crucial role in supporting someone experiencing betrayal trauma, providing encouragement and understanding during recovery. Understanding how to navigate these challenges protects your healing work.
Pressure from Others to “Get Over It”Friends, family members, and even well-meaning support systems may not understand trauma neurobiology. Comments like “It’s been six months—haven’t you forgiven them yet?” add pain to an already overwhelming situation.
Helpful responses include:
- “I’m working with a professional who specializes in betrayal trauma. My healing is progressing at the pace my brain needs.”
- “Forgiveness and healing are different processes. I’m focusing on healing first, which is what the research supports.”
- “I appreciate your concern. The most helpful thing you can do is let me talk about this at my own pace.”
You’re not obligated to educate everyone, but having simple language available can reduce the emotional support burden and maintain important relationships during your recovery.
Spiritual or Religious Confusion About ForgivenessMost of our therapists enjoy being part of a local church. But we have noticed many times that faith communities sometimes conflate forgiveness with reconciliation, creating pressure to restore relationships before healing has occurred. The reality is that genuine forgiveness—the kind that brings peace rather than resentment—requires full acknowledgment and processing of pain. Rushing this process doesn’t honor spiritual values; it prevents the authentic heart change that genuine faith calls for.
You can hold your spiritual values while also honoring the healing timeline your brain requires. Forgiving from a place of wholeness serves both your faith and your mental health far better than forced compliance that leaves trauma unresolved. If you are ready to begin your healing journey, support is available.
Self-Blame for Not Being “Ready” to ForgiveMany betrayed partners internalize the message that their inability to quickly forgive represents a character flaw. This self blame compounds the original trauma and slows healing.
Practice forgiveness toward yourself first. You’re not failing because your brain is protecting you. You’re not spiritually deficient because your nervous system needs time. Your intense feelings are evidence of the depth of your love and trust—not weakness.
Self compassion strategies that support healing:
- Speak to yourself as you would speak to a friend in the same circumstances
- Acknowledge that your reactions make sense given what happened
- Celebrate small progress rather than measuring against an arbitrary timeline
- Remember that finding healing is the goal, and it unfolds in its own time
Conclusion and Next StepsHealing creates the foundation for authentic forgiveness—not the reverse. When you understand that your brain literally cannot override trauma with willpower, you stop fighting your own neurobiology and start working with it. The bottom-up framework explains why you can forgive in your mind while your body remains triggered, and it shows the path forward.
Immediate next steps:
- Assess your current healing stage using the framework above
- Seek trauma-informed professional support if you haven’t already
- Give yourself permission to heal before expecting forgiveness to “work”
- Practice self compassion as a daily discipline
- Establish clear boundaries that protect your healing space
Related topics worth exploring as you continue your journey include understanding the specific requirements for rebuilding trust if you choose reconciliation, different trauma therapy approaches that address betrayal specifically, and how couples counseling works after one partner has done significant individual healing work.
Additional ResourcesFor couples who have moved through the individual healing stages and are ready for the reconnection phase, betrayal recovery counseling designed specifically for you can support the next chapter of your relationship—built on a foundation of genuine healing rather than premature forgiveness.
IntroductionPorn addicts compartmentalize by constructing invisible mental barriers that separate their addiction from every other aspect of their life—creating two distinct realities that never touch. Many porn addicts live a life of compartmentalization, presenting a respected image on the outside while harboring a shameful secret on the inside. Compartmentalization allows porn addicts to engage in their addictive behaviors while appearing normal to others. If you’ve recently discovered your partner’s porn use or sexual betrayal, you’re likely struggling to reconcile the person you thought you knew with the stranger who maintained this secret life. Realizing the impact of this compartmentalization is crucial for both addicts and their partners, as it marks the first step toward understanding and healing. Understanding how this psychological splitting works won’t erase your pain, but it can help you make sense of what feels incomprehensible.
https://youtu.be/iQk54D9F68A
This article explains the psychology behind compartmentalization in porn addiction, how it differs from normal mental organization, and what the recovery process requires. We will also explain the reasons behind compartmentalization and its effects on both addicts and their relationships. It’s written primarily for betrayed partners navigating the aftermath of discovery, though addicts seeking to understand their own behavior will also find clarity here. We’ll examine both the addict’s internal fog and your shattered reality—because both experiences are real, even when they seem impossible to reconcile.
The core answer: Sex and porn addicts compartmentalize through a defense mechanism called psychological splitting, which creates separate mental “boxes” that allow them to maintain two contradictory realities simultaneously—one where they love you genuinely, and one where they engage in behaviors that betray everything that love should mean. This pattern of secrecy and denial is similar to what is seen in a drug addict, where the individual maintains a facade of normalcy while hiding their addiction.
By the end of this article, you will understand:
- The psychological mechanics of splitting and how it operates in pornography addiction
- How to recognize the signs of compartmentalization you may have missed
- Why your addicted partner could genuinely love you while living a double life
- The de-compartmentalization process required for authentic recovery
- Actionable next steps for both partners and addicts
Understanding Compartmentalization in AddictionCompartmentalization is a defense mechanism where the brain divides thoughts, emotions, and behaviors into isolated mental containers that don’t communicate with each other. In its healthy form, this ability allows a surgeon to perform a difficult operation without being overwhelmed by concern, or a parent to set aside work stress to be present with their children. The brain temporarily walls off certain concerns so we can function.
In addiction, this normal mechanism becomes pathological. Rather than temporarily setting aside emotions to complete a task, the porn addict permanently separates their addictive behaviors from their moral identity, relationships, and consequences. They don’t consciously decide to do this—the brain constructs these walls automatically to avoid the unbearable cognitive dissonance of holding contradictory truths simultaneously. Compartmentalization is how addicts psychologically deal with their conflicting behaviors and emotions, allowing them to maintain destructive actions while appearing normal in other areas of life.
This is how your husband can teach your children about honesty while maintaining elaborate deception. How he can hold you tenderly at night while watching videos that objectify women during the day. The compartments don’t touch. At this point, addicts separate different aspects of their lives into distinct points or boxes—such as family, work, and sexual acting out—so that each area feels disconnected from the others. Men who engage in sexual betrayal are often adept at compartmentalizing their behavior to avoid guilt. In his experience, these aren’t contradictions because they exist in entirely different mental spaces.
The “Secret Life” BoxInside one compartment lives everything related to the addiction: the porn use, the masturbation, the searching, the hiding, the shame that surfaces briefly before being shoved back down. This box is where the porn addict lives out their secret life, operating with its own set of rules, its own logic, and its own reality. When the addict enters this space—which can happen in seconds through a trigger or cue—they access a different version of themselves.
The porn addict doesn’t experience this compartment as connected to you, the marriage, or the children. Within this box, those relationships feel distant, almost theoretical. The behavior feels victimless because the consequences exist in another compartment entirely. This is how addicts convince themselves that watching porn doesn’t qualify as cheating—because in the isolated reality of that box, you aren’t fully visible. Compartmentalization allows porn addicts to engage in their addictive behaviors while appearing normal in other aspects of their lives.
An internal fog clouds everything within this compartment. Rationalization becomes effortless: “It’s just a video.” “I’m not hurting anyone.” “This is my private life.” “Every guy does this.” The fog isn’t a conscious lie—it’s a genuine perceptual distortion that makes the behavior feel acceptable, even normal, in the moment. Porn addicts can appear normal and high functioning for years while secretly indulging in their addictive behaviors. The rules and logic of this box are shaped by addiction, which distorts perception and enables ongoing secrecy.
The “Family Life” BoxThe other compartment contains authentic love, genuine commitment, real care for you as his wife and for his family. This isn’t performance or manipulation—the emotions your partner expressed in this space were real. He accessed genuine tenderness, authentic connection, and sincere desire to be a good husband and father.
This is perhaps the hardest truth for betrayed partners to accept: both versions of your husband are real. The person who held your hand through difficult times wasn’t fake. The love wasn’t manufactured. But it existed in a compartment that had little awareness of the secret life running parallel to it. Often, partners try to listen and understand how this separation is possible, struggling to make sense of the emotional fragmentation and betrayal they feel.
Many addicts report feeling like two completely different people. When they’re in the family life box, the addiction feels like something that happened to someone else—a distant memory that doesn’t connect to their current experience. This complete disconnect allows them to function normally, maintain employment, parent effectively, and love genuinely—all while the addiction continues in its separate container. Pornography is often used to escape stress, loneliness, or emotional pain, with the behavior treated as a necessary, isolated escape and is best addressed with online counseling and therapy for porn addiction.
This understanding doesn’t excuse the behavior. It explains why you couldn’t see it, why he seemed sincere, and why the discovery feels like learning your partner has a secret twin. The shame cycle leads to intense shame and regret, which is often followed by a renewed urge to use pornography as a way to escape those painful feelings.
The Psychology of SplittingSplitting operates at both neurological and psychological levels, hijacking the brain’s executive functioning in ways that most people find difficult to fully understand. Porn addiction, like a drug addict’s struggle with substance abuse, alters brain chemistry and neural pathways. The prefrontal cortex—responsible for moral reasoning, consequence evaluation, and impulse control—becomes compromised during addiction cycles. Because the behavior is isolated from their daily life, the brain needs increasingly intense, novel content to achieve the same dopamine hit, causing the behavior to bleed into other life areas.
When the brain is neurologically dysregulated by compulsive sexual behavior, decision-making doesn’t function normally. The addict isn’t making a rational choice to prioritize pornography over the marriage. The addiction has created a pathway that bypasses rational thought entirely, creating what researchers identify as a kind of perseveration—an inability to shift attention away from the addictive stimulus. Pornography can temporarily increase sexual interest, but over time, it diminishes genuine desire for one’s spouse and negatively impacts emotional and relational intimacy.
This neurological reality coexists with psychological self-deception. The brain protects itself from the unbearable truth that “I am someone who does this” by simply refusing to integrate that knowledge. The addict brainwashes themselves into believing the behavior is separate from who they really are.
The Addict’s Internal FogThe mental fog that surrounds active addiction functions like radiation—invisible but contaminating everything it touches. Addictions, including sex and porn addiction, tend to escalate over time, and addicts describe this experience as a haze that descends during triggers and acting out, muffling consequences, numbing emotions, and distorting reality into something bearable.
Within this fog, rationalization operates automatically. Minimization requires no effort: “It’s not that bad.” “I can stop whenever I want.” “At least I’m not having an actual affair.” The addict isn’t consciously constructing these arguments—the fog generates them instantly to protect the compartmentalization.
Denial isn’t simply lying. It’s a genuine inability to perceive reality clearly. Addicts often justify their deceptive behaviors through denial, which becomes a coping mechanism. The addict shoves behaviors into mental boxes, slams the lid, and locks them—then genuinely forgets where they put the key. Shameful memories become almost inaccessible during normal functioning. Many porn addicts report genuine surprise when confronted with evidence of their behavior, as if learning about someone else’s actions.
Brief moments of clarity typically follow acting out—a window where the fog lifts and reality breaks through. In these moments, addicts feel crushing shame, make sincere promises, and genuinely intend to stop. But without recovery work, the fog returns, the compartments reseal, and the cycle continues.
The Partner’s Shattered RealityWhile the addict floats in foggy denial with neatly separated compartments, you experienced an integrated reality. You lived in one world where your relationship meant something specific, where you knew your partner, where the past made sense. Discovery demolishes that world entirely.
The experience betrayed partners describe—feeling like reality has fractured—isn’t metaphorical. Your brain built a coherent narrative of your life, but that narrative was based partly on lies. The discovery doesn’t just hurt; it dismantles your ability to trust your own perceptions. If you didn’t see this, what else have you missed? Was any of it real?
Most women experiencing betrayal trauma describe exactly this: questioning every memory, reinterpreting every moment, wondering if they ever knew the person they married. The pain isn’t just about the porn or the sexual betrayal—it’s about the fundamental disorientation of having your reality revealed as partial fiction.
Your experience couldn’t be more different from his. You lived in integrated truth while he lived in compartmentalized fog. This disparity explains why talk after discovery feels impossible—there is a disconnect in communication, as if you’re describing two entirely different relationships, two different histories, two different realities.
Why the Secret Life is Prison, Not PlaygroundIf you’re reading this as an porn addict, hear this clearly: the compartmentalized secret life feels like freedom but functions as prison. Each act of hiding, each locked box of shame, each moment of fog adds another bar to the cage you’re building around yourself.
The isolation compounds the addiction. Because the behavior lives in a sealed compartment, you cannot process it, cannot seek help for it, cannot bring it into relationship. You’re alone with it in the worst possible way—alone while surrounded by people who love you but aren’t allowed to see you. What may have started as ‘fun’ or excitement quickly loses its appeal, becoming a compulsive cycle that no longer brings real enjoyment.
The shame you’re trying to avoid through compartmentalization doesn’t diminish—it concentrates. Every locked box holds compressed shame that doesn’t disappear. The soul carries all of it, even when the conscious mind refuses access. This is why many addicts describe feeling increasingly hollow, disconnected from themselves, unable to fully experience joy even in their “good” compartment.
The double life costs everything eventually. The energy required to maintain separate realities drains you. The inability to be fully known by anyone—including yourself—creates a profound loneliness that the addiction then promises to solve, driving the cycle deeper.
Recovery means facing the ‘whole thing’—bringing all the hidden parts of your life together into the open, rather than keeping them in separate boxes. We encourage clients to open the compartment where they store their addiction and examine it as a crucial step toward integration and healing.
This isn’t a playground of consequence-free pleasure. It’s a prison of isolation and self-deception, and the sentence gets longer with every act.
The De-Compartmentalization ProcessRecovery from porn addiction requires demolishing the walls between compartments—a process called integration. This isn’t optional for genuine healing. As long as the addiction lives in a separate box, it remains protected from the accountability, connection, and emotional processing required to overcome it. Understanding the course of porn addiction and recovery is crucial, as the progression of compartmentalization and its eventual breakdown shapes both the challenges and milestones along the way.
De-compartmentalization means bringing the hidden behaviors into conscious awareness and holding them alongside the rest of life. It means the addict must simultaneously know “I am someone who did these things” and “I am someone who loves my family”—without the protective separation that made coexistence possible.
This process is extraordinarily painful. The shame that compartmentalization contained comes flooding back. The reality of harm caused becomes undeniable. The self that was protected by fog must face truth without filters. Many porn addicts resist this process not from unwillingness to change but from the genuine fear of what integration requires. Overcoming compartmentalization strategies typically requires therapy which incorporates evidence-based approaches that help individuals face and integrate these difficult truths.
Steps for Breaking Down Mental BarriersThe de-compartmentalization process requires structured support and follows a general progression:
- Full disclosure with professional guidance. Working with an experienced porn addiction therapist, the addict provides complete honesty about the scope and nature of behaviors—not as punishment but as the first act of integration. This means bringing all hidden aspects into the middle, or open, for examination. Bringing secrets into spoken reality begins breaking down compartment walls.
- Daily accountability and check-ins. Regular contact with accountability partners and sponsors interrupts the fog before it can fully form. Scheduled check-ins create structure that prevents the addict from disappearing into the secret compartment.
- Therapeutic trauma processing. Many sex and porn addicts developed compartmentalization in childhood, often in response to early trauma, adverse experiences, or age-inappropriate exposure to pornography—sometimes beginning as young teens. Healing the original wounds reduces the need for protective splitting.
- Emotional tolerance building. Because compartmentalization often developed to avoid unbearable feelings, recovery requires learning to tolerate difficult emotions without escape. This skill develops through therapy, support groups, and practice.
- Ongoing integration work. Even after initial disclosure and accountability, the tendency toward compartmentalization will persist until the brain discovers that genuine, healthy intimacy is a better reward. Recovery requires vigilance against old patterns and continued conscious effort to live an integrated life based on vulnerability and surrender to your romantic partner.
While therapy can take several weeks or months, commitment to integrated living is a lifelong task. It requires professional support, not just willpower.
Rebuilding Integrated IdentityAs compartmentalization breaks down, the addict must construct a new sense of self that doesn’t require separation to function. This means developing a unified identity that can hold complexity: “I am someone who has done harmful things AND I am someone capable of genuine love AND I am someone in recovery.” A crucial part of this process is moving away from shifting blame onto others—such as partners or external circumstances—and instead accepting accountability for one’s actions and emotions. Recognizing and letting go of blame is essential for genuine healing and rebuilding trust in relationships.
Healthy coping mechanisms must replace the escape hatch that porn provided. When difficult emotions arise, the addict needs tools other than dissociation and fantasy. These might include connection with support communities, physical exercise, creative expression, spiritual practice, or therapeutic techniques—anything that processes emotion rather than avoiding it.
The goal isn’t perfection but integration. The recovered addict doesn’t forget their history or pretend it didn’t happen. They hold it as part of a complete story, processed rather than locked away, informing present choices rather than driving unconscious ones.
Common Challenges and SolutionsThe path toward de-compartmentalization presents consistent obstacles. For teenagers, early exposure to pornography can have a significant impact on their development. Estimates suggest that many young people first see pornography between the ages of 10 and 14, with some exposed as early as 7. This early exposure can influence their perceptions of sex and lead to emotional and behavioral challenges during adolescence. Additionally, pornography can negatively impact school performance, relationships, and social activities for young viewers. Understanding these challenges in advance helps both partners and addicts navigate the recovery process more realistically.
Resistance to IntegrationAddicts may unconsciously resist breaking down protective barriers because those barriers served a purpose—they allowed functioning despite unbearable internal conflict. The brain doesn’t surrender defense mechanisms easily, even when consciously committed to change.
Solution: Gradual exposure under professional guidance allows the brain to adjust slowly rather than facing overwhelming integration all at once. Support groups with other addicts normalize the experience and reduce isolation. Patience with the process—from both the addict and the partner—acknowledges that rewiring takes time.
Partner Mistrust During RecoveryAfter experiencing elaborate compartmentalization and deception, partners struggle to believe change is real. Every promise sounds hollow after promises were broken. Every apparent sincerity recalls past sincerity that masked a double life. Most women in this position describe waiting for the other shoe to drop for some time.
Solution: Trust rebuilds through consistent action over extended time, not through words or promises. Transparent access to devices, locations, and schedules demonstrates accountability. Structured accountability programs with therapists and sponsors provide external verification. Partners should expect to need years, not months, to fully restore trust—and that timeline is reasonable, not excessive.
Emotional Overwhelm During IntegrationWhen compartment walls come down, the flood of shame, grief, and regret can feel unsurvivable. Addicts may be tempted to reconstruct barriers simply to escape the intensity of integrated awareness.
Solution: Structured therapeutic support provides containment for overwhelming emotions. Processing occurs in manageable portions rather than all at once. Support groups with other addicts offer perspective that the feelings, while intense, are survivable. Partners should understand that this emotional intensity, while difficult to witness, indicates genuine integration rather than manipulation.
Conclusion and Next StepsCompartmentalization in porn addiction isn’t a choice or a character flaw—it’s a normal response to problematic behavior that becomes a prison. Understanding how it works explains why your addicted partner could love you genuinely while betraying you systematically. It explains the two-person phenomenon that makes discovery so disorienting and shattering. And it illuminates why recovery requires complete dismantling of the walls that made the double life possible.
For addicts, immediate next steps include:
- Seek an experienced pornography addiction recovery counsellor or Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT) who understands the neurobiology and psychology of compulsive sexual behavior
- Begin preparing for disclosure with professional guidance—partial truth perpetuates compartmentalization
- Connect with a recovery community through programs designed specifically for sex and porn addicts
- Commit to daily accountability that prevents fog from forming
For betrayed partners, immediate next steps include:
- Find trauma-informed support specifically for partners of porn addicts—your experience requires specialized care
- Understand that his compartmentalization explains but does not excuse—your feelings of betrayal are completely valid
- Recognize that this is not your fault—you could not have seen what was deliberately hidden in a sealed compartment
- Consider therapeutic support for yourself separate from any couples work
The recovery process is long and difficult for everyone involved. Integration—bringing the secret life into the light—creates the possibility of genuine healing, but not the guarantee. What feels incomprehensible today can eventually make sense, though the world you rebuild will look different from the one that shattered.
IntroductionScanning, ogling, and objectification are behaviors that continue the patterns of porn addiction in the real world. They impact your relationship, your partner’s sense of safety and trust, and even the well-being of the women around you. Recognizing the harm these behaviors cause is a crucial step on your recovery journey. Scanning, ogling, and objectification are a real problem with serious consequences for relationships and society, as they can indicate deeper issues related to addiction and compulsivity.
https://youtu.be/xI2VrAU44vo
If you’re reading this, you already know these behaviors need to stop, and you want to change. Sexual objectification—reducing women to their bodies or body parts for sexual interest—plays a major role in these patterns. Sexual objectification of women is rampant in our culture and is likely getting worse. This article offers practical guidance and support to help you interrupt these patterns and rebuild healthier ways of relating.
By reading this article, you will gain:
- Clear understanding of the difference between noticing and lusting
- Practical bouncing eyes techniques to interrupt scanning patterns
- Humanization exercises that rebuild healthy perception
- Strategies for partner communication and trust rebuilding
- Tools for navigating high-risk environments during recovery
Understanding Scanning and Objectification in Recovery ContextExplicit Definitions:
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Scanning is the intentional act of seeking visual sexual stimulation and validation from real people in your environment. In the context of pornography addiction, scanning refers to actively searching for and visually cataloging attractive individuals or body parts, often in public spaces, to fuel sexual arousal. Scanning, objectification, and ogling in pornography fuel pornography addiction by conditioning the brain for constant novel sexual stimulation and reinforcing a dopamine-driven loop of compulsion.
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Ogling is the act of staring at someone in a way that is overtly sexual or lingering, often focusing on specific body parts. Ogling goes beyond a passing glance and involves a prolonged, deliberate gaze that objectifies the person being looked at.
- Objectification in pornography reduces human beings to mere sexual purposes or body parts, leading to compulsive behaviors and distorted views on sexuality. This means seeing someone not as a whole person, but as an object for sexual gratification, which can deeply affect both the viewer and the person being viewed.
Scanning is the intentional act of seeking visual sexual stimulation and validation from real people in your environment. When an addict finds themselves mentally cataloging attractive women, checking out body parts, or seeking eye contact, it reflects the same addictive patterns that drove their pornography use.
These sexual behaviors are part of the addiction pattern, reinforcing compulsive habits and making recovery more challenging. This differs from neutral noticing of beauty in everyday life. Most men notice when someone is attractive—this is a natural part of human perception. The key is what happens next: whether the recognition stays neutral or shifts into sexual objectification.
Sexual objectification goes beyond simple appreciation; it involves viewing women primarily as objects for sexual interest, often influenced by societal and media messages. This can twist men’s views of women, disregarding their inner qualities in favor of physical appearance.
Understanding this distinction helps avoid confusion and supports genuine recovery. The challenge isn’t noticing a woman’s beauty—it’s how you respond to that noticing.
The Validation-Seeking ComponentPorn addicts often seek eye contact or other signs of validation to temporarily soothe feelings of low self-esteem. This need for validation is often tied to sexual desire, as the addict seeks affirmation of their attractiveness or worth. When a woman acknowledges their presence, it triggers a dopamine release similar to what porn provided. For some addicts, seeking validation can even become a substitute for masturbation or other sexual behaviors.
During abstinence from porn, this need for validation can increase, leading the brain to redirect cravings toward real people. This is part of the addiction cycle, and recognizing it helps you approach these urges with compassion and intentionality. It’s important to note that porn addiction can also lead to low sex drive and decreased interest in sex with a partner.
Objectification vs. AppreciationAppreciating beauty means briefly recognizing that someone is attractive without engaging in fantasy or mentally cataloging body parts. Objectification happens when intent, duration, and mental engagement extend beyond this neutral recognition, focusing on physical features that attract sexual interest and reducing a person to those features.
Key factors to consider:
Intent: Are you passively receiving information or actively seeking stimulation?
Duration: Does your gaze move on naturally or linger?
Mental engagement: Are you simply noticing, or constructing fantasies?
For example, noticing a coworker’s outfit is appreciation. Letting your eyes linger and imagining how it would feel to be in their position—reduced to body parts and judged solely on sexual interest—is objectification. Imagine how dehumanizing it would feel to be seen only as the sum of your parts, with your desires and feelings ignored. The first respects the person’s humanity; the second reduces them to an object.
Partners often sense this difference intuitively, and understanding it can support honest conversations and healing.
Types of Scanning Behaviors in RecoveryScanning behaviors exist on a spectrum, from obvious ogling to subtle attention-seeking that may not feel like acting out but still fuel the addiction. Scanning often involves looking at other women, which can negatively impact romantic relationships and perpetuate objectification. Ogling is a common behavior among sex addicts and can provide a direct trigger to relapse. It’s wrong to minimize or justify these behaviors, as doing so overlooks their harmful effects. Recognizing these patterns supports effective intervention.
Visual Scanning in Public SpacesThis includes checking out women in everyday environments like stores, workplaces, or social settings, often by visually scanning and evaluating a woman’s body. The eyes actively seek and catalog attractive women, building a “mental database” that feeds fantasies and potential relapse.
These images are stored and recycled, extending the impact beyond the moment. Prolonged staring or ogling can feel invasive to those on the receiving end, affecting real people with their own lives and dignity. Sexual objectification can also prevent men from having a thriving, mutually supportive relationship with women.
Digital Scanning Beyond PornRecovery may involve shifting from explicit porn to related behaviors like scrolling social media for provocative images or browsing dating apps without intent to connect. As porn increases, especially during recent years, these digital scanning behaviors have become more common and can maintain addiction by activating the same reward pathways. High-frequency consumption of pornography reduces gray matter volume in the right caudate and weakens functional connectivity in the prefrontal cortex, highlighting the neurological impact of these habits.
Being mindful of these digital habits is important, as they can serve as gateways back to full pornography use.
Attention-Seeking BehaviorsSome porn addicts find themselves seeking eye contact, compliments, or validation from women as a way to regulate emotions and self-esteem. For a husband struggling with porn addiction, these attention-seeking behaviors can negatively impact marital relationships and intimacy. Friendly interactions or positioning to be noticed become ways to receive temporary relief from feelings of inadequacy. Partners of porn addicts often experience feelings of betrayal and insecurity due to their partner’s compulsive behaviors.
These behaviors often stem from deeper attachment and self-worth challenges, which require compassionate attention alongside behavioral changes.
The Impact of Porn on Sex Drive and RelationshipsIf you’re watching porn, it might feel like a harmless way to explore your curiosity or enhance your sexual excitement, but we understand that for many people like yourself, it can create a profound and challenging impact on both your sex drive and your relationships. When you find yourself caught in patterns of compulsive porn use, your brain’s reward system begins to shift, making it increasingly difficult for you to find genuine satisfaction in real-life intimate experiences. Over time, as you continue frequent porn use, you may notice your sex drive diminishing, as your brain becomes less responsive to natural sexual connection and increasingly seeks the intense stimulation that pornography provides.
One of the most distressing consequences you might face in this journey is porn-induced erectile dysfunction. If you’re struggling with this, you’re not alone—many people find themselves unable to achieve or maintain an erection with their real partner, even though they experience no difficulty during solo sexual activity while watching porn. This disconnect can feel confusing and deeply troubling for you, creating frustration that affects both you and your partner. The compulsive patterns that often develop alongside porn dependency can create a cycle where your sexual experiences become focused primarily on release rather than the genuine connection and intimacy you truly desire.
As your relationship with pornography intensifies, you may find yourself becoming more drawn to these digital experiences than to your actual intimate life with your partner. This shift can leave your partner feeling overlooked, undesirable, or emotionally disconnected from you, and it can slowly erode the foundation of trust and intimacy that your relationship needs to thrive. Your sexual experiences may begin to feel less about shared joy and connection and more about managing an overwhelming compulsion, which can make your partner feel as though they’re in competition with a screen for your attention and love.
The impact of compulsive porn use on your sex drive and relationships extends far beyond physical performance—it touches the very core of your ability to connect authentically, your sense of control over your own life, and the way addiction can overshadow the relationships that matter most to you. Recognizing these patterns in your own experience is actually a powerful first step toward reclaiming your autonomy, rebuilding the healthy intimate life you deserve, and restoring the deep connection with your partner that brings real fulfillment.
Practical Recovery Techniques for Stopping ScanningChanging scanning behaviors involves intentional, practiced techniques to interrupt the pattern and retrain the brain.
One effective method is ‘urge surfing,’ a mindfulness-based technique where you observe the urge to scan or ogle without acting on it, allowing the feeling to rise and fall like a wave.
Effective recovery from pornography addiction can also involve mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and establishing strict boundaries.
The Bouncing Eyes TechniqueThis technique helps you redirect your gaze immediately when you notice the urge to scan or ogle.
Steps:
- Notice when your eyes are drawn to a woman’s body and look away right away
- Focus on something neutral—floor, sign, phone—anything non-sexual
- Take a conscious breath to interrupt the arousal response
- Continue with your activity without looking back
The “3-second rule” is key: urges peak and begin to fade within seconds if not fed. Redirecting your gaze within this window helps weaken addictive neural pathways.
Practice tips:
- Practice in low-risk settings by looking away from images or ads
- Ask your partner or accountability partner to gently signal if your gaze lingers
- Track your success to build awareness and momentum
- For best results, be completely committed to using the bouncing eyes technique each time the urge arises.
Humanizing and Personification PracticesBeyond behavior, shifting how you think about women is essential. Humanization exercises help you see women as full people with their own lives, not objects for consumption.
Try thoughts like:
- “She is someone’s daughter, mother, or partner”
- “She has her own experiences and challenges unrelated to me”
- “She dresses for herself, not for my benefit”
- “She deserves dignity and respect in public spaces”
Imagining how you would feel if your loved ones were objectified can deepen empathy and reduce objectification naturally.
Mindfulness and Awareness BuildingDeveloping awareness of physical sensations that precede scanning helps you catch urges early. Experts explain that mindfulness practices are effective because they help you notice these sensations and intervene before acting on them.
Notice signs like:
- Increased alertness or tension in your neck
- A pulling sensation in your eyes
- Faster heart rate or shallow breathing
The practice of ‘urge surfing’ involves sitting with the discomfort of an urge without acting on it, recognizing that the feeling will pass.
Grounding yourself in physical reality—feeling your feet, noticing sounds or temperature—can interrupt dissociation and keep you present.
Prepare for high-risk environments (gyms, beaches, summer weather) by planning where to direct your gaze and reminding yourself of your recovery goals.
Rebuilding Relationships and IntimacyRebuilding relationships and intimacy after experiencing the pain of porn addiction or compulsive sexual behavior is a deeply personal journey—one that requires not just patience and commitment, but also profound self-compassion. If you’re reading this, you’ve already taken the most courageous step: acknowledging how porn has impacted your relationship and making the conscious choice to heal. Letting go of porn isn’t just about breaking a habit; it’s about creating sacred space for authentic connection and the deeply fulfilling intimacy you and your partner deserve.
Seeking Support and TherapyYou don’t have to walk this path alone, and you shouldn’t. Connecting with a therapist or counselor who truly understands sexual addiction can provide you with the specialized, expert guidance that transforms struggle into strength. Many couples discover profound healing through support groups, where your experiences are met with understanding and where you can learn from others who share your journey toward recovery. These aren’t just resources—they’re lifelines that help you and your partner address the deeper emotional wounds that may have contributed to the addiction, whether that’s unresolved stress, emotional pain, or unmet needs that deserve compassionate attention.
Rebuilding Intimacy Through HabitsAs you begin rebuilding your relationship, you’ll discover the power of intentional habits that naturally foster intimacy and trust. Picture yourself scheduling those meaningful date nights that become the foundation of reconnection, embracing open and honest communication that creates safety, and allowing space for emotional vulnerability that deepens your bond. Those small gestures of affection, thoughtful acts of service, and shared activities aren’t just nice touches—they’re powerful tools that help you rediscover the love and connection that brought you together, often making it even stronger than before.
Self-Care and Personal Well-BeingYour personal well-being is the cornerstone of lasting recovery, and practicing self-care isn’t selfish—it’s essential. When you engage in hobbies that bring you joy, spend time with friends and family who support your healing, and prioritize your own emotional and physical health, you’re actually strengthening your ability to maintain healthy boundaries and resist old patterns. This isn’t about willpower alone; it’s about building a life so fulfilling that destructive behaviors simply lose their appeal.
Remember, rebuilding intimacy is a journey of healing, not a destination to rush toward. You will experience ups and downs, and setbacks are not failures—they’re natural parts of your recovery story that actually strengthen your resilience. What truly matters is your willingness to keep moving forward with compassion for yourself, to maintain honest communication with your partner, and to reach out for support when you need it. With time, dedicated effort, and the right therapeutic guidance, you absolutely can overcome the impact of porn addiction and create the deeply connected, satisfying, and joyful relationship and intimacy you’ve always deserved.
Common Challenges and SolutionsMinimizing or Rationalizing the BehaviorIt’s common to tell yourself “I’m just appreciating beauty” or “all men do this.” While these thoughts are understandable, they can prevent progress by minimizing the impact.
Reflect honestly on your behavior and its effects. Accountability practices like sharing lapses with your partner or support group can help counter rationalizations.
Partner Triggers and Relationship ConflictPartners, such as a wife, may be hypervigilant and triggered by scanning behaviors due to past hurt, which can cause emotional pain and feelings of betrayal. Transparent communication about struggles and progress rebuilds trust.
It is important for partners of porn addicts to seek support from friends, family, or support groups to cope with their feelings. Agree on signals or check-ins to support accountability. Celebrate successes and seek professional help if needed. If you have just discovered your husband’s porn habit, there are resources and guidance available to help navigate this difficult moment.
High-Risk Environments and SituationsIdentify your personal triggers and prepare strategies to manage them, such as choosing less crowded times or avoiding certain settings during early recovery. Some men may rationalize scanning behaviors by citing a ‘high sex drive,’ but it’s important to recognize this as a potential justification rather than a solution. Additionally, quitting porn can lead to withdrawal symptoms such as depression and low libido, which can make managing triggers even more challenging.
Have an emergency plan to remove yourself if triggers become overwhelming.
Conclusion and Next StepsScanning and ogling are behaviors that reflect ongoing patterns of porn addiction in the real world. These actions not only harm relationships but also negatively impact the other side—women who are objectified—by increasing their vulnerability to violence and mental health challenges. Stopping these behaviors supports rebuilding trust and healthier relationships.
Acknowledging wrongdoing and establishing forgiveness is crucial for healing relationships affected by porn addiction.
Action steps:
- Start practicing the bouncing eyes technique immediately
- Use humanization exercises regularly
- Share your commitment with your partner
- Track your urges and progress in a journal or app
For deeper healing, consider working with a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT) who understands the connection between porn addiction, objectification, and relationship dynamics.
Recovery is a process, but it is possible. Many porn addicts have transformed their habits, rebuilt relationships, and developed genuine self-control and healthy sexuality. You can too.
Additional ResourcesTherapevo and similar organizations offer specialized therapy for pornography addiction, addressing both behaviors and underlying causes. Consider exploring with a therapist or support group how factors from childhood, such as early exposure or upbringing, may contribute to patterns of objectification and addiction.
Look for CSAT-certified professionals or equivalent expertise. Support groups like Sexaholics Anonymous, Sex Addicts Anonymous, and Celebrate Recovery provide community and accountability.
Other helpful tools include:
- Accountability apps for device monitoring
- Books on betrayal trauma and recovery
- Couples therapy with addiction-informed specialists
Recovery is about more than stopping harmful behaviors—it’s about becoming someone capable of real intimacy, connection, and respect for yourself and others.
IntroductionIf pornography addiction were simply about having a high sex drive, you wouldn’t find yourself reaching for it when you’re exhausted after a long workday, when you’re feeling lonely on a Friday night, or when stress from work has you wound tight. The pattern reveals something important: you aren’t just “horny.” You are trying to regulate your internal state.
https://youtu.be/eOP0kjHTCZE
This distinction matters because it changes everything about how we approach recovery from problematic pornography use. This content is for anyone who has tried willpower-based approaches and failed, who feels shame about their pornography consumption despite wanting to stop, or who suspects there’s something deeper driving their compulsive sexual behavior. Understanding porn as an affect regulation tool—not merely hypersexual behavior—opens pathways to genuine healing that blocking software and accountability apps alone cannot provide.
Here’s the direct answer: Pornography addiction is fundamentally a maladaptive coping mechanism the brain employs to manage emotional distress, not just an expression of high libido. Research consistently shows that emotion regulation difficulties fully mediate the relationship between negative emotional states and problematic pornography use, meaning the underlying issue is how you handle uncomfortable emotions, not how much sexual desire you have.
By reading this article, you will:
- Understand why traditional “just stop” approaches fail and what actually drives compulsive behavior
- Learn the HALT framework for identifying your immediate emotional triggers
- Recognize how deeper attachment wounds and trauma create vulnerability to addictive behaviors
- Discover why building new emotion regulation strategies is essential for lasting recovery
- Find a compassionate path forward that addresses root causes rather than symptoms
Understanding Affect RegulationAffect regulation refers to your brain’s capacity to identify, tolerate, and modulate emotional experiences—particularly intense or aversive ones. In everyday life, this means being able to sit with frustration without exploding, process sadness without spiraling or burying it, and manage anxiety without needing to escape. When this system works well, you can navigate negative emotions without being overwhelmed or needing external substances or behaviors to cope.
When Healthy Regulation Goes Wrong: Addictive BehaviorsFor many people, healthy emotional regulation skills never fully developed in childhood. When caregivers were emotionally unavailable, inconsistent, or unable to model how to manage big feelings, children don’t learn how to soothe themselves in healthy ways. The brain, being remarkably adaptive, then seeks alternative solutions.
This is where the brain’s reward system becomes relevant. Pornography delivers rapid dopamine surges that temporarily numb discomfort with remarkable efficiency. The brain essentially finds a “super-stimulus” solution to an internal regulation problem—it works, at least in the short term, which is exactly why it becomes so compelling.
The Maladaptive Coping Cycle and Emotional DysregulationWhen you use pornography to escape negative feelings, something powerful happens neurologically. The temporary relief from emotional distress creates a reinforcement cycle: stress activates your avoidance response, porn provides dopamine-driven calm, and this neural pathway strengthens with each repetition.
Over time, this creates tolerance—you need more or escalating content to achieve the same regulatory effect. Meanwhile, the brain’s reward circuits become sensitized to pornographic cues and desensitized to natural rewards like healthy intimacy and and other adaptive coping strategies. This sensitization of the brain’s reward circuits is why problematic pornography consumption feels increasingly compulsive: you’re not choosing to use porn so much as your brain is defaulting to a learned regulation strategy.
Understanding this cycle helps explain why willpower fails: removing the coping mechanism without addressing the underlying dysregulation leaves you with no way to manage the emotional distress that drove the behavior in the first place.
The Brain’s Reward System and Porn AddictionUnderstanding the brain’s reward system is essential to grasp why porn addiction—and other behavioral addictions—can feel so powerful and difficult to break. At its core, the brain’s reward system is designed to reinforce behaviors that promote survival and well-being by releasing dopamine, a neurotransmitter that creates feelings of pleasure and motivation. However, when it comes to compulsive sexual behaviors and problematic pornography consumption, this system can be hijacked by the constant novelty and intensity of sexual stimuli found online.
With repeated exposure to highly stimulating pornographic material, the brain’s reward circuits become overactivated. This leads to a surge in dopamine far beyond what’s experienced with natural rewards like socializing, hobbies, or even real-life intimacy. Over time, the brain adapts by reducing the number of dopamine receptors and increasing the threshold needed to feel pleasure. This means that everyday life can start to feel dull or unfulfilling, while cravings for pornography become more intense and harder to resist.
This cycle is at the heart of what makes compulsive sexual behavior disorder (CSBD) so challenging. Individuals may find themselves using porn not just for sexual arousal, but as a way to cope with emotional distress, negative emotions, or even boredom. The Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale (PPCS) is one tool clinicians use to assess the severity of these behaviors, looking at how often and how long someone uses porn, as well as the negative consequences it brings—such as relationship strain, financial issues, or emotional dysregulation.
Impulse control becomes compromised as the brain’s reward system prioritizes the immediate relief or escape that porn provides over long-term well-being. This is where negative reinforcement mechanisms come into play: using porn to avoid or numb negative feelings like stress, anxiety, or sadness. While this may offer short-term relief, it reinforces the behavior, making it more likely to recur whenever emotional discomfort arises.
Addressing porn addiction, therefore, requires more than just willpower or blocking access. Effective emotion regulation strategies—such as mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy, and building healthier coping mechanisms—are crucial for breaking the cycle. These approaches help individuals manage negative emotions, improve impulse control, and find new ways to experience pleasure and connection in everyday life.
Ultimately, understanding the psychological and neurobiological underpinnings of porn addiction empowers individuals to seek out treatments that address both the behavior and the underlying mental health issues. By focusing on emotional regulation and developing adaptive coping strategies, it’s possible to reduce the negative consequences of problematic pornography use and move toward lasting recovery and improved mental health.
The Surface Level: HALT and Daily TriggersThe HALT model provides a practical framework for identifying the immediate triggers that make you vulnerable to pornography use. HALT stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and Tired—four common physiological and emotional states that create conditions ripe for seeking quick relief through the brain’s reward circuitry.
Hungry – Physical DepletionWhen blood sugar crashes or physical needs go unmet, your prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain responsible for impulse control and rational decision-making—functions less effectively. This creates vulnerability to seeking quick dopamine fixes.
Physical depletion lowers your capacity for emotional responses that require energy and self-control. Your brain, seeking efficiency, defaults to the fastest available solution for feeling better. Pornography, with its immediate reward, becomes an attractive and easily accessible option when your regulatory resources are depleted.
Angry – Stress and FrustrationWork stress, relationship conflicts, financial pressures, and daily frustrations all create emotional tension that demands release. Exposure to negative stimuli, such as emotionally aversive events or images, can heighten emotional responses and increase vulnerability to problematic pornography use. Many people describe porn as a “pressure release valve”—a way to discharge anger and negative affect without confrontation or consequences.
Research using the Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale and related measures consistently shows that stress-induced mood regulation is a primary motive for problematic online pornography use. The behavior serves as an escape from emotional distress, temporarily disconnecting you from the source of frustration while flooding your system with pleasure chemicals.
Lonely – Social and Emotional IsolationLoneliness represents one of the most potent triggers for problematic pornography use. Studies examining the relationship between loneliness and PPU found that emotion regulation difficulties fully mediate this connection—meaning loneliness drives problematic use specifically through impaired ability to handle the emotional discomfort of being alone.
Pornography creates an illusion of connection and intimacy without the vulnerability that real relationships require. For someone experiencing negative emotional stimuli from isolation, porn temporarily fills the void of human connection while paradoxically reinforcing the isolation that drives the behavior.
Tired – Mental and Emotional ExhaustionDecision fatigue and burnout create particularly fertile ground for compulsive behavior. When you’re mentally exhausted, the prefrontal cortex’s capacity for impulse control diminishes significantly. This is why so many people report their pornography consumption happens late at night, after depleting their mental resources throughout the day.
Exhaustion also creates a need for numbing. When you’re too tired to process the day’s accumulation of negative emotions, porn offers a way to simply not feel—to escape into stimulation rather than sitting with discomfort. The behavior becomes a numbing agent for overwhelming feelings.
Boredom – Doesn’t Fit the HALT Acronym But It Is ImportantAnother significant immediate trigger for pornography consumption is boredom. Boredom usually occurs as a result of a lack of connection or a lack of purpose. When working with clients, we educate them on HALT+B for boredom as it becomes important to pay attention to when you are feeling any of these emotions and rather than falling back into old patterns, intentionally pursue healthy choices to properly take care of them.
These HALT triggers represent the surface level of understanding—the daily, immediate states that create vulnerability. Knowing them, and having a plan in place to take care of these emotions is key. But for lasting recovery, we need to go even deeper.
The Deep Dive: Attachment Wounds and Childhood TraumaHere’s a crucial insight: boredom and trauma exist on the same spectrum of dysregulation. The person using porn out of Tuesday afternoon boredom and the person using it to escape flashbacks are both attempting to regulate internal states—they’re just at different points on the intensity scale.
Understanding this continuum helps explain why surface-level interventions often fail: you can address HALT+B triggers all day, but if deeper wounds remain untreated, the dysregulation will find another outlet.
Now, not every porn addict has experienced attachment disturbances or is carrying unresolved trauma in their nervous system. But if you have had friends or other recovery group members who have been able to get sober quickly and wonder why you are not able to get into a well-established sobriety as quickly or easily as them, it may be because your addiction is medicating deeper or more significant wounds than what others are carrying.
Attachment DisturbancesAttachment wounds develop when early childhood environments lack emotional attunement. Neglect, inconsistent caregiving, or emotional unavailability from primary caregivers can create core beliefs about being fundamentally unlovable, unsafe in relationships, or incapable of having needs met by others.
These attachment disturbances create persistent underlying mental health issues that affect how you relate to yourself and others throughout life. When intimate relationships feel dangerous or impossible, pornography offers a counterfeit: sexual stimuli without vulnerability, arousal without risk of rejection. The brain, seeking the comfort that secure attachment would provide, settles for the dopamine hit that porn delivers.
Research on psychological factors in compulsive sexual behavior disorder consistently identifies attachment insecurity as a significant predictor. The behavior isn’t really about sex—it’s about soothing the deep ache of disconnection, highlighting the importance of emotional intimacy in healthy sexual experiences.
Unresolved Trauma ResponsesChildhood trauma creates dysregulated nervous systems that struggle to maintain emotional equilibrium. Survivors often experience hypervigilance, dissociation, emotional overwhelm, or chronic anxiety—states that demand regulation the trauma never taught them to achieve healthily.
Pornography becomes self-medication for these trauma responses. Sexual arousal can temporarily override hypervigilance. The trance-like focus of pornography consumption can substitute for dissociation. The dopamine flood can briefly quiet the chaos of emotional dysregulation.
This pattern parallels what we see in substance addiction and other behavioral addictions: the behavior provides short-term symptom management while creating long-term negative consequences. Brain imaging studies show similar prefrontal cortex impacts in problematic hypersexual behavior as in drug addiction, including changes in emotional processing and heightened cue reactivity.
Affect Regulation Deficits in Behavioral AddictionsSome people simply were never taught healthy emotion regulation strategies. Without models for how to process difficult feelings, the brain adapts by finding external solutions for internal problems.
This explains why compulsive sexual behaviors often emerge or intensify during adolescence—a period of intense emotional experience without fully developed regulatory capacity. Pornography offers a reliable, accessible, and immediate solution to emotional pain. The brain learns: “This works,” and the neural pathways cement accordingly.
This also explains why willpower alone fails for lasting recovery. You cannot simply remove a coping mechanism without building replacement skills. The dysregulation that drove the behavior remains, and without new tools, relapse becomes nearly inevitable.
Common Challenges and Coping Strategies: SolutionsUnderstanding pornography addiction as affect regulation clarifies why many traditional or sefl-guided approaches fail—and points toward what actually works for addiction treatment.
Challenge: Removing Coping Without ReplacementThe most common mistake in addressing problematic pornography use is focusing entirely on stopping the behavior without building alternative coping strategies. This creates a vacuum: the emotional distress that drove porn use remains, but the mechanism for managing it disappears.
Solution: Before expecting sustained sobriety, invest in developing healthy affect regulation skills. This might include working with a therapist to learn how to managing emotional triggers, developing mindfulness practices for sitting with discomfort, physical exercise for discharging stress, or creative outlets or daily rituals for processing emotions. A relapse prevention plan should center on what you’ll do instead of porn, not just on avoiding porn.
Challenge: Shame Cycles That Worsen DysregulationShame about pornography consumption creates additional emotional distress, which then drives more porn use for regulation, which creates more shame—a vicious cycle that intensifies compulsive behavior rather than resolving it.
Solution: Reframe your understanding of the behavior with compassion. Your brain found a solution to manage pain—it was maladaptive, but it was attempting to help you survive. This isn’t about excusing the behavior or its negative consequences; it’s about understanding it accurately so you can address the root cause. Shame-based approaches to behavioral addiction characterized by compulsivity consistently show poor outcomes compared to compassionate, understanding frameworks. Or, in plain English, shame is not productive when it comes to recovery. Self-compassion always works better.
Challenge: Surface-Level Treatment Missing Deeper WoundsAccountability apps, website blockers, and restriction-based interventions address symptoms while leaving causes untouched. These tools have their place, but when attachment disturbances or trauma histories drive the behavior, surface solutions cannot provide lasting change.
Solution: Seek trauma-informed therapy that addresses both the addictive behaviors and the underlying wounds. This might involve working through attachment issues in the therapeutic relationship, processing trauma memories with EMDR or somatic approaches, and developing new relational capacities alongside new regulation skills. Therapevo’s holistic approach exemplifies this integration—coupling sobriety support with attachment repair and skill-building creates the conditions for genuine, lasting recovery.
Addressing impulse control disorder or compulsive sexual behaviors requires understanding them within the broader context of mental health and developmental history. Future research continues to support integrated approaches that address psychological and neurobiological considerations together.
Conclusion and Next StepsRecovery from pornography addiction requires both sobriety AND building new emotional regulation skills. You cannot simply white-knuckle your way to freedom while leaving the underlying dysregulation untreated—the brain will find another outlet for unmanaged distress, whether through other addictive behaviors, depressive symptoms, generalized anxiety disorder, or relapse.
Understanding porn as affect regulation rather than mere sexual compulsion offers a more compassionate and effective path forward. You’re not broken, morally defective, or beyond help. Your brain found a solution to an overwhelming problem—and now you can find better solutions. Solutions that leave you feeling healthier, more authentic, and ready for real connection rather than carrying more secrets and shame.
Immediate next steps:
- Start tracking your HALT states—notice when you’re Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired, and what happens to your urges
- Build awareness of your emotional states throughout the day, practicing naming what you feel without judgment
- Begin developing one or two healthy alternative coping mechanisms for managing negative affect
- Consider seeking professional support from therapists who understand both addiction recovery and trauma—Therapevo’s holistic approach specifically addresses the intersection of compulsive behavior and attachment wounds
- For deeper attachment and trauma work, prioritize finding a clinician trained in these areas who can help you heal the root causes, not just manage symptoms
Related topics worth exploring include understanding withdrawal symptoms in behavioral addictions, the neuroscience of the brain’s reward system in cybersex addiction, and attachment-focused therapy for relational healing. Each of these can deepen your understanding and support your recovery journey.
Recovery is possible. It requires understanding what your brain has been trying to accomplish, compassion for the survival strategies you developed, and commitment to building new ways of regulating your internal world. You deserve that healing.
IntroductionA phone buzzes on the nightstand. The betrayed partner’s chest tightens, their heart pounds, and suddenly they’re flooded with the same panic they felt on discovery day—even though it’s just a work notification. The betraying partner sees the fear in their eyes and feels crushing shame, which triggers their own defensive response: “It’s just my boss. Why are you always so paranoid?” Within seconds, both partners are drowning in pain neither intended to cause.
https://youtu.be/7ruRND-mrcM
This article addresses the trigger-induced conflicts that derail recovery after infidelity—whether emotional affairs, physical betrayal, or compulsive sexual behavior including pornography addiction. Betrayal trauma can also result from broken trust by a close friend, not just a romantic partner. When trust is broken, it leaves deep emotional scars and can significantly impact self-esteem, making it harder to feel secure in oneself and the relationship. Fears of future betrayals are common and can influence the healing process, as the mind tries to protect itself from being hurt again. The content is designed for couples in early to mid-recovery phases who find themselves caught in escalating cycles whenever betrayal trauma triggers surface. Understanding these dynamics matters because without intervention, these cycles erode the foundation couples need to rebuild trust and move toward healing.
Navigating triggers requires recognizing they are legitimate trauma responses for the betrayed partner and shame triggers for the betraying partner, with specific de-escalation techniques that interrupt the destructive cycle before it spirals.
By the end of this article, you will understand:
- Why triggers are neurological alarm systems, not jealousy or manipulation
- How the betraying partner’s shame response compounds the betrayed partner’s pain
- The specific cycle that escalates conflict and how to interrupt it
- Communication scripts that create emotional safety during trigger episodes
- When and how to seek professional support for deeper healing work
Understanding Betrayal Trauma TriggersBetrayal trauma triggers are neurological alarm systems that activate when the brain detects reminders of the original infidelity. These reminders—a song, a location, a physical sensation, a time of day—cause the nervous system to respond as if the betrayal is happening again in this moment. Research shows that 43% of betrayed partners continue experiencing these trauma triggers for more than two years, making them a normal part of the healing process rather than a sign of failure. Emotional triggers can be powerful reminders of the original betrayal and are distinct from ordinary emotional responses, often requiring specific attention in therapy and emotional processing.
The critical distinction: triggers are fundamentally different from ordinary relationship jealousy or insecurity. Jealousy involves concern about potential future threats. Triggers involve the brain’s threat detection system responding to past trauma as though it’s present danger. This difference matters because treating triggers as jealousy dismisses the betrayed partner’s legitimate neurobiological response and prevents the couple from addressing the actual problem. Betrayal trauma can also be compounded by other traumas, which may further impact a person’s sense of safety and self-worth.
The emotional landscape of betrayal trauma is particularly complex, with survivors frequently oscillating between feelings of vulnerability, anger, and profound sadness.
It’s Not Jealousy, It’s Trauma (For the Betrayed Partner)When a trigger activates, the panic, rage, or emotional numbness you experience is a legitimate trauma response—not evidence that you’re “being difficult” or “can’t let go.” Your brain encoded the betrayal along with every sensory detail present during discovery: the time of day, the physical sensations in your body, specific words or sounds. Now, when you encounter something resembling those details, your nervous system perceives a threat and floods your body with stress hormones.
Brain imaging research confirms that social pain—including relationship betrayal—activates the same neural regions as physical injury. The anterior cingulate cortex and insula, areas that process physical pain, show similar activation patterns during experiences of betrayal. Your emotional pain is neurologically real. The racing heart, the intrusive thoughts, the difficulty breathing, the overwhelming anxiety—these are somatic responses to perceived threat, not character flaws or overreactions.
This is why clinicians often describe severe post-infidelity symptoms using the framework of post traumatic stress disorder. You may experience hypervigilance (constantly scanning for signs of danger), difficulty with emotional regulation, flashbacks to discovery day, and raw emotions that feel overwhelming and disproportionate to the present moment. These experiences reflect how trauma rewires the brain’s threat detection system, making you exquisitely sensitive to anything associated with the original betrayal. Survivors may find themselves living in a constant state of hypervigilance or emotional alertness, as their minds and bodies remain on guard as a protective response to further hurt.
Understanding this allows self compassion: you are not broken. Your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do—protect you from threats. The problem is that the threat detection system cannot distinguish between actual, current danger and reminders of past danger. The loss of trust from betrayal trauma can loom large, making current (or future) relationships feel daunting and often leading to a fear of intimacy and vulnerability.
The Shame Shield Response (For the Betraying Partner)When you witness your partner’s pain during a trigger episode, you likely experience overwhelming shame. This shame—the recognition that you caused this profound sense of suffering—triggers your own fight/flight/freeze response. You may find yourself becoming defensive (“I’ve told you nothing is happening”), withdrawing (“I can’t deal with this right now”), minimizing (“That was months ago”), or even counter-attacking (“You’re never going to trust me, are you?”).
This defensive reaction is what we call the “Shame Shield.” It’s not malice. It’s not evidence that you don’t care. It’s your nervous system’s attempt to protect you from the intense emotions that arise when confronted with the damage you caused. The shame feels unbearable, so your brain seeks escape.
However—and this is crucial—the Shame Shield compounds your partner’s pain. That self-protective reflex can actually harm them. How, you ask? When they’re triggered and you withdraw or defend, they experience your response as abandonment or rejection. The person who was once their safe space is now both the source of their trauma and unavailable to help them through it. This escalates their distress, which intensifies your shame, which strengthens your defensive response. See the cycle? Understanding this cycle is the first step toward breaking it.
The connection between these two trauma responses—your partner’s trigger activation and your shame-based defense—creates the destructive cycle that this article will teach you to interrupt.
Common Signs of Betrayal Trauma TriggersRecognizing the common signs of betrayal trauma triggers is a crucial step in the healing process. These trauma triggers can show up in both emotional and physical ways, often catching the betrayed partner off guard. Common signs include:
- Sudden anxiety, anger, or fear
- Physical sensations (racing heart, nausea, headaches, muscle tension)
- Emotional numbness
- Intrusive thoughts
- Hypervigilance
- Difficulty relaxing or sleeping
Identifying these common signs of betrayal trauma triggers allows individuals to develop effective coping strategies and seek proper support. By understanding how trauma and betrayal manifest in both body and mind, betrayed partners can take proactive steps toward healing, emotional regulation, and ultimately, reclaiming their sense of safety and self-worth.
The Destructive Cycle: How Triggers Escalate ConflictMost couples who experience post-betrayal conflict aren’t fighting about the trigger itself. They’re caught in a predictable escalation pattern where each partner’s pain response activates the other’s, creating a spiral that can take hours or days to resolve—and leaves both feeling more wounded than before.
Step 1: The Trigger OccursCommon triggers include:
- Phone notifications
- Anniversaries (including “D-day”—discovery day)
- Locations associated with the affair
- Physical intimacy
- Movies or TV showing infidelity themes
- Encountering the betraying partner’s colleagues or friends who knew about the affair
- Ordinary words or phrases that carry painful associations
When a trigger activates, the betrayed partner may experience: racing heart, shallow breathing, muscle tension, tunnel vision, difficulty concentrating, emotional flooding or emotional numbness, intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, nausea, and a profound sense of danger. These physical sensations and emotional responses occur automatically—the betrayed partner cannot simply “choose” not to react. The emotional pain of betrayal trauma can also manifest in physical symptoms such as headaches, fatigue, or digestive issues.
The trauma response window—the time between trigger activation and peak intensity—can be seconds. This is why triggers often seem to “come out of nowhere” and why the betrayed partner’s reaction may seem disproportionate to the triggering event. Their nervous system is responding to the original betrayal, not the present moment.
Step 2: Pain Expression Meets Shame ShieldWhen the trigger activates in their nervous system, the betrayed partner expresses their distress—often through tears, anger, questions, accusations, or withdrawal. This expression of pain immediately activates the betraying partner’s shame. The internal experience for the betraying partner might be: “I’ve destroyed them. I’m a terrible person. I can’t bear to see what I’ve done.”
This unbearable shame triggers the betraying partner’s own fight/flight/freeze response:
- Fight: Defensiveness, counter-accusations, anger (“Why can’t you just move on?”)
- Flight: Physical or emotional withdrawal, changing the subject, leaving the room
- Freeze: Shutting down, going silent, dissociating from the conversation
None of these responses provide what the betrayed partner needs: presence, validation, and reassurance of safety. Instead, each response confirms the betrayed partner’s worst fears: that they are alone, that their pain doesn’t matter, that the betraying partner cannot be trusted to prioritize their emotional well being.
Step 3: The Escalation SpiralWhen the betrayed partner encounters the Shame Shield, their abandonment fears intensify. The trigger response, which was already causing emotional distress, now includes the additional trauma of being dismissed or abandoned in their moment of need. This escalation often manifests as increased intensity: louder voices, more pointed accusations, or complete emotional shutdown.
The betraying partner, now facing escalated pain expression, experiences even greater shame and doubles down on defensive responses. The cycle feeds itself: trigger → pain → shame → defense → abandonment → escalation → greater shame → greater defense.
Without intervention, this spiral can continue for hours. Even after it subsides, both partners are left wounded: the betrayed partner feels unheard and unsafe, the betraying partner feels like a perpetual failure incapable of doing anything right. Over time, repeated cycles erode the foundation of safety necessary for healing and can ultimately destroy the relationship.
Breaking the Cycle: Practical De-escalation StrategiesThe key insight for breaking this cycle: safety must come before intimacy. Neither partner can engage in productive conversation, rebuild trust, or move toward healing while their nervous system is in threat response. The first goal during a trigger episode is not resolution—it’s regulation. Seeking professional counseling for each of you individually and engaging in trauma-focused therapy such as EMDR, Brainspotting or Somatic Experiencing is essential for addressing underlying issues related to betrayal trauma.
After some personal work, moving into couple’s work further helps with recovery. Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT) helps partners identify negative emotional cycles and rebuild secure attachment. Of course, complete disclosure is necessary for trust; withholding information can cause further trauma. Full disclosure is a necessary prerequisite to couple’s work. Gottman’s ‘Atone, Attune, Attach’ model offers a structured approach for processing trauma, resolving conflict, and restoring intimacy. Creating ‘bottom lines’ or non-negotiable deal-breakers is recommended to establish safety and boundaries in the relationship.
A skilled therapist can guide you in cultivating self-compassion, teaching you to treat yourself with kindness rather than self-blame. Therapy also supports the development of emotional resilience, equipping you with tools to regulate intense emotions and manage trauma triggers as they arise. Over time, this work helps restore a sense of control and confidence, making it possible to rebuild trust—both in yourself and in future connections.
Whether you are working to heal within your current relationship or preparing for future relationships, therapy offers the structure, support, and professional guidance needed to move forward. By investing in your emotional healing through therapeutic approaches, you lay the foundation for lasting personal growth and healthier, more fulfilling relationships.
Let’s look at some practical techniques you can use in addition to seeking counseling.
The STOP Technique for Betraying PartnersWhen you recognize your partner is triggered, your instinctive responses will likely make things worse. The STOP technique interrupts your Shame Shield before it activates:
- S – Stop and breathe before responding: When you feel the urge to defend, explain, or withdraw, pause. Take three deep breathing cycles. This interrupts the automatic shame response and gives your prefrontal cortex time to come online.
- T – Turn toward your partner’s pain instead of away: Physically orient toward your partner. Make eye contact if they can tolerate it. Your body language communicates safety or threat before you say a word.
- O – Offer presence without trying to fix or explain: Resist the urge to make it better. Your partner doesn’t need solutions right now—they need to know you can witness their pain without abandoning them.
- P – Practice the holding space script: Use the words: “I see that you are hurting right now. I am here. I am not going anywhere.” This script works because it validates reality (they are hurting), affirms presence (you are here), and provides reassurance against abandonment (you’re not leaving).
Holding space means remaining present without collapsing into your own shame. You don’t need to fix the trigger—you simply need to be a steady, non-anxious presence while your partner’s nervous system regulates.
The SAFE Protocol for Betrayed PartnersWhile the betraying partner works on holding space, the betrayed partner can take actions that support their own emotional regulation and communicate their needs clearly:
- S – Signal to your partner that you’re triggered: Name what’s happening: “I’m having a trauma response right now.” This shifts the frame from accusation to information and helps your partner recognize this is about past trauma, not present behavior.
- A – Ask for what you need in the moment: Do you need your partner to stay close? Give you space? Hold you? Reassure you they’re not going anywhere? Identify and communicate your specific need.
- F – Focus on grounding techniques: While communicating with your partner, engage techniques that regulate your nervous system: deep breathing, feeling your feet on the floor, noticing five things you can see. The 5-4-3-2-1 Sensory Method is another effective grounding technique—name five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear, two you can smell, and one you can taste to anchor yourself in the present. These practices help your body recognize you are safe in this moment.
- E – Engage support systems when needed: Sometimes triggers are too intense to manage with your partner alone. It’s acceptable to call a trusted friend, family member, or therapist. Reaching out to loved ones for support can be vital in the healing process. Having a support system beyond your partner is essential for sustainable recovery.
Communication Scripts That WorkThe following table contrasts harmful responses with alternatives that support healing:
| Situation | Harmful Response | Helpful Response | | --- | --- | --- | | Betrayed partner expresses pain | “I’ve already apologized. What more do you want?” | “I see that you are hurting right now. I am here.” | | Betrayed partner asks repeated questions | “I’ve answered this a hundred times.” | “You need reassurance right now, and that makes sense.” | | Betraying partner feels overwhelmed | “I can’t do this anymore.” | “I’m feeling overwhelmed. Can we take a 20-minute break and come back?” | | Betrayed partner is shutting down | “Fine, don’t talk to me then.” | “I notice you’re pulling away. I’m staying right here when you’re ready.” |
For the betraying partner during trigger activation: “I see that you are hurting right now. I am here. I am not going anywhere. I’m not going to defend myself or explain. I just want to be with you in this.”
For the betrayed partner during trigger activation: “I’m having a trauma response. This isn’t about something you’re doing right now—it’s the past showing up. I need you to stay present with me.”
After the trigger subsides (for both partners): “Thank you for staying with me through that. Can we talk about what happened when we’re both regulated?”
These scripts create a safe space for processing emotions without escalation.
Community Support and HealingCommunity support is a powerful resource for anyone recovering from betrayal trauma. Connecting with others who have experienced similar pain can provide a profound sense of validation and understanding, helping you feel less alone on your healing journey. Support groups—whether online or in-person—offer a safe space to share emotions, process experiences, and receive encouragement from those who truly “get it.”
Engaging with a supportive community can also foster accountability and motivation, inspiring you to continue working toward your healing goals even when the process feels overwhelming. The shared wisdom and empathy found in these groups can help you develop new coping strategies, navigate setbacks, and celebrate progress.
When combined with professional therapy, community support becomes an essential pillar of recovery. It reinforces your sense of self-worth, helps you process difficult emotions, and reminds you that healing is possible. By reaching out and allowing yourself to feel supported, you take an important step toward emotional well-being and a renewed sense of hope after trauma and betrayal.
Holistic Healing ApproachesHolistic healing approaches offer a comprehensive path to recovery for those dealing with betrayal trauma. By addressing the physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of well-being, these methods help individuals move beyond survival and toward a more profound sense of healing.
Mind-Body TechniquesPractices such as deep breathing, meditation, and yoga can calm the nervous system and support emotional regulation. These mind-body techniques are effective in reducing the intensity of trauma triggers and helping you reconnect with your body in a safe way.
Incorporating these practices into your daily routine can provide a sense of stability and control. Over time, you may notice improved emotional balance and a greater ability to manage stress.
Somatic and EMDR ApproachesIn addition to mind-body techniques, modalities like somatic experiencing and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) are designed to help process and integrate traumatic memories. These approaches foster greater emotional resilience by allowing you to work through trauma in a structured, supportive environment.
Somatic experiencing focuses on releasing stored tension in the body, while EMDR helps reprocess distressing memories so they no longer trigger overwhelming emotional responses. Both methods encourage self-compassion and self-awareness, empowering you to respond to intense emotions with kindness and understanding.
The Importance of Healthy BoundariesEstablishing healthy boundaries is a vital part of recovering from betrayal trauma. After experiencing the pain of infidelity, setting clear and compassionate limits helps protect your emotional well-being and prevents further harm. Healthy boundaries are not about punishing the cheating partner; rather, they are an act of self-care and a way to honor your own healing journey.
By communicating your needs and limits assertively, you begin to rebuild your sense of self-worth and self-trust. This might mean setting boundaries around communication, privacy, or the pace of your healing process. For example, you may need to limit discussions about the affair to certain times, or request space when feeling overwhelmed by raw emotions. These boundaries help you prioritize your emotional well-being and create a safe space for processing emotions.
Professional therapy and support groups can be invaluable resources for learning how to establish and maintain healthy boundaries. With proper support, you can develop the confidence to advocate for your needs, protect yourself from further emotional manipulation, and lay the groundwork for more fulfilling relationships in the future. Remember, healthy boundaries are a cornerstone of healing from trauma and betrayal, and a powerful step toward reclaiming your life.
Building a Personalized ToolkitIncorporating holistic healing into your journey can lead to a deeper connection with yourself, improved emotional regulation, and a renewed sense of purpose. By embracing a variety of healing practices, you create a personalized toolkit for managing stress, processing emotions, and building a more fulfilling and meaningful life after betrayal.
Common Challenges and SolutionsEven with these tools, specific challenges arise that require targeted solutions. The healing journey is not linear, and setbacks are expected.
Addressing SetbacksSetbacks are a normal part of the recovery process. It’s important to remember that progress may come in waves, and difficult days do not erase the growth you’ve achieved. When setbacks occur, focus on self-compassion and reach out to your support system for encouragement.
When the Betraying Partner Feels Overwhelmed by Constant TriggersLiving with a partner experiencing betrayal trauma can feel overwhelming. When triggers occur daily—or multiple times daily—the betraying partner may feel they can never do anything right, that they’re walking on eggshells, or that the relationship is hopeless.
The solution: Understand that trigger frequency typically decreases over time when the betraying partner responds with consistent presence rather than defense. Each time you hold space successfully, you deposit into your partner’s safety account. Each defensive response makes a withdrawal. Individual therapy is essential for building distress tolerance, managing your own shame, and developing healthy coping mechanisms that don’t depend on your partner’s healing pace.
It’s also acceptable to have feelings about the difficulty of this process—but those feelings need to be processed with a therapist, support group, or trusted friends, not with your partner during their trigger episodes.
When the Betrayed Partner Feels Unheard or DismissedDespite the betraying partner’s efforts, the betrayed partner may continue feeling that their pain isn’t truly understood. This can manifest as repetitive questioning, escalating emotional responses, or withdrawal.
The solution: Validation must precede any attempt at problem-solving. The betrayed partner needs to hear explicit acknowledgment of their pain before they can engage with practical matters. Specific phrases that convey understanding:
- “What I did was devastating. Of course you’re struggling.”
- “Your pain makes complete sense given what I put you through.”
- “I know I caused this and I regret it.”
- “You don’t have to get over this on my timeline. I’m here for however long it takes.”
These statements prioritize the betrayed partner’s emotional reality over the betraying partner’s desire for resolution. Rebuilding self trust and self worth takes time; the betrayed partner must be allowed to heal at their own pace.
When Both Partners Are Triggered SimultaneouslySometimes the betrayed partner’s trigger activates the betraying partner’s shame so intensely that both partners are simultaneously dysregulated. Neither can hold space for the other because both nervous systems are in threat response.
The solution: Implement a pause protocol. Either partner can call a pause by saying: “We’re both triggered right now. Let’s take 30 minutes to regulate individually and come back.” During the pause:
- Go to separate spaces
- Use individual regulation techniques (deep breathing, walking, cold water on face)
- Do not text, call, or continue the conversation during the pause
- Return at the agreed time, even if you don’t feel “ready”
The timeline matters: too short a pause doesn’t allow regulation; too long feels like abandonment. Thirty minutes is usually sufficient, but couples may need to adjust based on their patterns.
Conclusion and Next StepsBetrayal trauma triggers are a normal part of recovery after infidelity—not evidence that the relationship is failing or that the betrayed partner can’t “move on.” The 43% of partners who experience symptoms for two or more years are not weak; they are experiencing legitimate neurological responses to profound violation of trust. Similarly, the betraying partner’s shame response is predictable, not malicious—though it must be managed to prevent further harm.
Breaking the trigger-escalation cycle requires both partners to understand their own responses and develop skills for interruption. The betrayed partner needs validation that their trauma is real, while the betraying partner needs to hold space without collapsing into defensive shame. Safety—the felt sense that the betraying partner will remain present and accountable—must be established before intimacy can be rebuilt.
Immediate next steps:
- Choose one script from this article and practice it this week, even during low-intensity moments
- Schedule individual therapy sessions—the betrayed partner for trauma processing, the betraying partner for shame management
- Create a trigger response plan together, including pause protocols and agreed-upon language
- Identify your support system: trusted friends, family members, or support groups who can provide additional resources during difficult periods
Professional counseling, especially from therapists who understand betrayal trauma and have a trauma-treatment approach in their toolkit, is essential for healing from betrayal trauma. Rebuilding trust and emotional connection with loved ones, with the support of both professional counseling and your support system, plays a crucial role in the recovery process.
Additional ResourcesProfessional support significantly improves outcomes for couples navigating betrayal trauma. Consider:
- Specialized infidelity recovery therapy: Working with therapists trained in betrayal trauma provides therapeutic support tailored to the unique dynamics of post-infidelity healing
- Couples intensives and retreats: Concentrated therapeutic work can accelerate breakthroughs that weekly sessions take months to achieve
- Support groups: Connecting with others on similar healing journeys normalizes your experience and provides community during isolation. Support can also come from loved ones and close friends, who play a vital role in the recovery process.
The path toward healing is neither quick nor linear, but with proper support, professional guidance, and commitment from both partners, recovery is possible. Emotional healing happens when safety is consistent, accountability is maintained, and both partners commit to the long work of personal growth and relationship restoration.
IntroductionYou’ve made it thirty days without pornography. Maybe sixty. Perhaps you’ve even crossed the ninety-day threshold that so many recovery communities celebrate. Yet despite the streak on your counter app, something still feels wrong. The irritability hasn’t lifted. Your partner still seems distant, guarded. And that familiar pull toward acting out behaviors hasn’t disappeared—it’s just coiled tighter, waiting.
https://youtu.be/NexPQjSUkVc
This experience is far more common than most addicts realize. Many men find themselves trapped in what we call white knuckle sobriety: abstaining from pornography through sheer willpower while the underlying emotional pain that drove the addiction in the first place remains untouched. Just as someone might abstain from alcohol but still struggle with the underlying issues of addiction, stopping pornography use is only the first step. This article addresses individuals experiencing this frustrating cycle, partners who feel unsafe despite their loved one’s abstinence, and anyone seeking to understand why staying sober isn’t the same as getting well.
The direct answer: Sobriety in porn addiction means cessation of acting out behaviors—no pornography, no compulsive sexual behaviors, counting the days clean. Recovery, however, involves a complete transformation: healing attachment wounds, developing emotional regulation, rebuilding integrity, and addressing the root causes of compulsive behavior. Sobriety stops the “what.” Recovery heals the “why.”
By the end of this article, you will understand:
- The clinical distinction between sexual sobriety and true recovery
- Why white knuckling eventually fails—and the signs you’re doing it
- Why your partner may still feel unsafe even during your sober periods
- The path from mere sobriety to lasting freedom and relationship healing
Recovery is not just about achieving a specific result; it’s about embracing the idea that this is an ongoing journey and a shift in mindset, focused on continual growth and learning.
Understanding Sobriety vs. Recovery in Porn AddictionThe confusion between these two concepts causes immense suffering for people struggling with sexual addiction and their partners. When we conflate stopping a behavior with healing from it, we set ourselves up for cycles of relapse, shame, and relationship rupture. Understanding this distinction isn’t academic—it’s the foundation of a new life.
Key Definitions: Sobriety, White Knuckling, and Recovery Sobriety: Sobriety is the cessation of a behavior, often measured in days or weeks without acting out. * White knuckle sobriety: White knuckle sobriety refers to staying sober by forcefully resisting urges without addressing the root causes of addiction. * Recovery:* Recovery from porn addiction requires a focus on emotional healing and developing healthier coping mechanisms. Genuine recovery is a holistic, long-term process that addresses root causes, emotional health, and lifestyle changes.
What is Sobriety in Porn AddictionSexual sobriety refers to abstinence from specific acting out behaviors. In the context of porn addiction, this typically means no pornography consumption, no compulsive masturbation, and no engagement with other sexual behaviors that violate one’s values or relationship agreements.
The “counting days” mentality—tracking time since last use, celebrating sobriety milestones, maintaining a sobriety date—represents a necessary first step. Sobriety addresses the “what” of addictive behavior: the pornography viewing itself. This matters because it allows the brain to begin healing from dopamine dysregulation. Research from Utah State University found that structured treatment achieved a 92 percent reduction in pornography viewing, with participants showing significant improvement in breaking the behavioral cycle.
However, sobriety alone does not address why the behavior developed, what emotional needs it was meeting, or what wounds in the person’s sexual history and attachment patterns made them vulnerable to addiction in the first place.
What is Recovery in Porn AddictionReal recovery involves holistic transformation across emotional, relational, and behavioral dimensions. It means developing genuine emotional regulation—the capacity to tolerate difficult feelings without acting out. It requires healing attachment wounds that may stretch back to childhood. It demands building integrity: alignment between one’s values, emotions, and actions, particularly within intimate relationships. Embracing the idea that recovery is a journey of ongoing learning and development, rather than a fixed endpoint, is essential to this process.
The recovery process addresses the “why” behind sexual addiction. Why did pornography become a coping mechanism? What underlying emotional needs was it meeting? What unmet needs for connection, soothing, or escape drove the compulsive pattern? True recovery means developing healthier ways to meet these needs.
Critically, recovery includes the relational dimension that mere sobriety ignores. For partners who have experienced betrayal trauma, watching someone stop a behavior provides only partial safety. True healing in the relationship requires witnessing genuine emotional growth, developing empathy, and validating the partner’s pain—not just behavioral compliance.
The Problem with White-Knuckling SobrietyWhite knuckling describes the experience of forcing abstinence through willpower alone, without addressing the underlying issues driving the addiction. It’s the “cold turkey” approach that relies solely on determination and avoiding temptation. Many individuals initially believe this is what recovery looks like: just stop doing the thing.
The reality is quite different. White knuckling typically leads to increasing irritability, emotional numbness, social isolation, and ultimately, relapse. The person may technically be sober, but they’re not well. Partners often describe this state as living with someone who is physically present but emotionally absent—what Alcoholics Anonymous literature calls a “dry drunk.”
Signs of White-KnucklingBehavioral Indicators:
- Constant vigilance against triggers, exhausting mental energy on avoidance
- Rigid thinking patterns and black-and-white reasoning about sexuality
- Social isolation and withdrawal from activities that might present temptation
- Counting days obsessively while feeling no genuine internal change
Emotional Symptoms:
- Persistent irritability, short temper, or emotional volatility
- Feeling numb, flat, or disconnected from your own emotions
- Increased anxiety and hypervigilance about potential relapse
- Shame spirals when intrusive thoughts or urges arise
Physical Signs:
- Chronic tension, particularly in jaw, shoulders, or chest
- Sleep disruption and fatigue
- Nervous system dysregulation: feeling constantly on edge or exhausted
Relational Patterns:
- Emotional unavailability to your partner despite behavioral compliance
- Defensiveness when your partner expresses fear or hurt
- Expecting credit or trust simply for maintaining sobriety
Why White-Knuckling Eventually FailsThe fundamental problem with white knuckling is that it treats symptoms while ignoring the disease. Compulsive sexual behavior typically develops as a coping mechanism for emotional pain—whether from trauma, attachment injuries, loneliness, shame, or chronic stress. When someone stops the behavior but doesn’t address these root causes, the underlying pressure doesn’t disappear. It builds.
Nervous system science helps explain this: maintaining white knuckle sobriety requires chronic hypervigilance, which keeps the nervous system in a state of threat response. This depletes emotional resources and decision-making capacity over time. When life pressures increase—work stress, relationship conflict, loneliness—the person lacks the internal resources to cope without their primary coping mechanism. Relapse becomes almost inevitable.
Most addicts who relapse repeatedly despite genuine effort aren’t failing at willpower. They’re demonstrating that willpower alone cannot heal trauma, regulate a dysregulated nervous system, or meet the attachment needs that pornography was attempting to address.
Impact on PartnersPartners often report a confusing experience: their loved one has stopped viewing pornography, yet they still feel unsafe in the relationship. Many partners affected by sexual addiction are women, and women often experience unique trauma and require tailored support in their recovery process. This isn’t irrational. Partners with betrayal trauma have learned that their sense of safety cannot depend on behavior alone—they need to see genuine emotional transformation.
When someone is white knuckling, partners often sense it. They notice the emotional distance, the irritability, the lack of genuine connection. The person may be sober, but they’re not emotionally available. They may be avoiding temptation, but they’re not doing the work of building healthy relationships or demonstrating empathy for the pain their addiction caused.
For partners, witnessing white knuckle sobriety can actually maintain trauma symptoms because the fundamental dynamic hasn’t changed: they’re living with someone whose emotional energy is consumed by managing urges rather than building genuine intimacy.
The Path from Sobriety to True RecoveryThe good news is that the journey from mere sobriety to true recovery is well-mapped. It requires professional support, commitment to self-awareness, and willingness to feel rather than avoid. But it can lead individuals from surface-level sobriety to true healing and wholeness, especially when guided by clinical expertise and one’s personal values. Ultimately, this path leads to lasting freedom rather than ongoing struggle.
Community plays a crucial role in the recovery process by providing support, accountability, and relational safety. Being part of a community offers a safe space to share struggles, challenge lies, and reduce shame. Community involvement can lead to transformation at the heart level, reshaping desires and responses to triggers, and is essential for deeper healing.
Addressing Root Causes and Attachment WoundsSexual addiction rarely develops in isolation. For many men, compulsive pornography use began as a response to pain they didn’t know how to process: childhood emotional neglect, attachment injuries with caregivers, experiences of shame around sexuality, or unprocessed trauma. The porn became a way to self-soothe, escape, or experience a sense of connection without the vulnerability of real relationship.
Recovery requires identifying and healing these attachment wounds. This typically happens in therapy, where the therapeutic relationship itself becomes a corrective emotional experience. A skilled therapist creates safety for exploring sexual history, early experiences, and the emotional landscape that made addiction appealing. As these wounds heal, the driving force behind compulsive behavior diminishes.
This is fundamentally different from relying solely on willpower or accountability structures. While those elements support recovery, they cannot substitute for the deep work of addressing why pornography became necessary in the first place.
Developing Emotional Regulation and IntegrityEmotional regulation means developing the capacity to experience difficult emotions—fear, shame, loneliness, anger, grief—without immediately seeking to escape them through addictive behavior. Most addicts developed their coping mechanisms precisely because they lacked this capacity. The recovery process builds it.
Therapeutic approaches that support this development include mindfulness training, somatic therapy for nervous system regulation, and attachment-focused interventions that help clients recognize emotional states and respond to them with self-compassion rather than compulsion.
Integrity work is equally essential. Addiction corrodes integrity—the alignment between values and actions. Recovery involves rebuilding this alignment, which means becoming honest (with self and partner), taking accountability for harm caused, and making decisions that reflect genuine values rather than impulse. This integrity becomes the foundation for healthy relationships and sustainable long term sobriety.
Comparison Table: Signs of Sobriety vs. Signs of Recovery
| Aspect | White-Knuckle Sobriety | True Recovery | | --- | --- | --- | | Emotional State | Irritable, numb, or anxious; avoiding feelings | Able to feel and process difficult emotions; growing emotional vocabulary | | Focus | Counting days; avoiding triggers | Building a meaningful sober life; pursuing values | | Self-Awareness | Minimal insight into underlying patterns | Deepening understanding of own experience, wounds, and needs | | Coping Strategies | White knuckling through urges; distraction | Healthy coping mechanisms; emotional regulation skills | | Partner Relationship | Defensive; expecting credit for sobriety | Empathic; actively working to understand partner’s pain | | Accountability | External compliance; hiding struggles | Transparent about challenges; seeking support | | Shame Response | Shame spirals after urges or slips | Self-compassion; viewing setbacks as information | | Nervous System | Chronic hypervigilance; dysregulated | Increasing regulation; able to return to calm | | Life Direction | Focused on what to avoid | Focused on who to become |
The Importance of Mental Health in RecoveryWhy Mental Health MattersMental health is at the heart of true recovery from sexual addiction. For many individuals, acting out behaviors like compulsive pornography use or other addictive behaviors are not just isolated problems—they are attempts to manage overwhelming emotions, soothe underlying emotional pain, or escape from trauma, anxiety, or depression. In other words, these behaviors often serve as coping mechanisms for deeper mental health struggles.
Addressing Underlying IssuesThe recovery process requires more than just stopping the sexual behaviors themselves. It means taking an honest look at the underlying issues that drive addiction in the first place. Many individuals discover that their struggles with sobriety are closely linked to unaddressed trauma, chronic stress, or persistent feelings of loneliness and shame. Without recognizing and working through these underlying emotional challenges, it becomes incredibly difficult to maintain sobriety in the long term.
Therapeutic ApproachesAddressing mental health in recovery is not a sign of weakness—it’s a crucial step toward lasting freedom. This might involve working with a therapist to process trauma, learning new coping mechanisms to handle difficult emotions, or seeking support for anxiety or depression that may have fueled the addiction. By prioritizing mental health, people in recovery can break the cycle of using sexual acting out as a way to numb or avoid their feelings, and instead develop healthier ways to respond to life’s challenges.
Ultimately, real recovery is about healing the whole person—not just stopping a behavior, but building a new life where emotional pain is met with compassion and effective coping strategies. When mental health becomes a central focus of the recovery process, individuals are far more likely to conquer addiction, maintain sobriety, and experience true healing.
Common Challenges in Moving Beyond SobrietyThe transition from mere sobriety to real recovery involves predictable challenges. Recognizing them as normal parts of the journey—rather than evidence of failure—helps maintain progress.
“I’ve Been Sober for X Days, Why Don’t I Feel Better?”This is perhaps the most common frustration in early recovery. The reality is that brain healing and emotional healing operate on different timelines. Dopamine regulation may begin improving within weeks of abstinence, but addressing the underlying emotional and attachment issues that drove addiction takes longer.
Feeling emotionally numb or persistently irritable during sobriety is actually normal—it often reflects the absence of the numbing agent (pornography) without yet having developed alternative coping strategies. The solution isn’t to push through harder but to engage more deeply: begin or intensify therapy, develop an emotional vocabulary, practice self-compassion rather than self-criticism, and recognize that the discomfort signals the need for deeper work, not more willpower.
“My Partner Still Doesn’t Trust Me”This pain is real, but the desire for your partner to trust you after you’ve stopped the behavior reflects a misunderstanding of betrayal trauma. Your partner’s nervous system learned that you are unsafe. That learning doesn’t reverse because you’ve maintained sobriety for a period of time—it reverses when they consistently experience you as emotionally present, honest, accountable, and empathetic.
Trust rebuilding requires understanding that your partner’s fear is about what your addiction cost them, not a commentary on your current effort. It means demonstrating genuine empathy for their pain, maintaining transparency, engaging in couples therapy focused on betrayal trauma recovery, and allowing them to set the timeline for healing. Most importantly, it requires recognizing that recovery must ultimately be for yourself and your own integrity—not merely to regain your partner’s trust.
“I Keep Relapsing Despite My Best Efforts”Repeated relapse despite genuine commitment to staying sober strongly suggests that root causes remain unaddressed. Rather than viewing relapse as moral failure, the recovery community increasingly frames it as information: what unmet needs, unprocessed emotions, or triggering circumstances led to the return to addictive behavior?
This reframe isn’t permission to relapse—it’s recognition that conquer addiction requires understanding its mechanisms. If you’re struggling with repeated relapse, the answer isn’t more willpower. It’s professional support from a therapist specializing in compulsive sexual behavior, possible engagement with groups like Sexaholics Anonymous or similar communities, and honest examination of what needs or wounds the addiction is attempting to address.
Conclusion and Next StepsThe distinction between sobriety and recovery isn’t semantic—it’s the difference between struggling forever and finding lasting freedom. Counting days matters. Maintaining sobriety creates the foundation for true healing. But if you stop there, you’ll likely find yourself cycling through periods of white knuckle sobriety, eventual relapse, shame, and renewed determination that leads nowhere new.
Recovery asks more of you: facing the pain you’ve been avoiding, healing the wounds that made addiction appealing, developing the emotional capacity to experience life fully rather than numbing it, and rebuilding integrity in your relationship with yourself and others. It’s harder than just stopping. But it leads to a sober life that you actually want to live.
Your next steps:
- Assess honestly: Are you practicing white knuckling or engaged in genuine recovery work? The comparison table above can help you recognize where you stand.
- Seek professional support: Recovery from sexual addiction—like recovery from any serious mental health challenge—typically requires professional guidance. A therapist specializing in compulsive sexual behavior can help you address root causes that willpower cannot touch.
- Address underlying emotional needs: Begin developing awareness of your emotional states and what you’re truly seeking when urges arise. This self awareness is foundational to lasting change.
- Include your partner: If you’re in a relationship, recognize that their healing journey is distinct from yours and deserves its own support.
Don’t just stop. Heal. If you’re ready to move beyond counting days toward genuine recovery, Therapevo Counselling offers a free 20-minute consultation to discuss your situation and explore whether our specialized approach to porn addiction recovery and couples therapy might support your journey.
For partners navigating this experience, we also provide resources and therapeutic support for betrayal trauma recovery and couples work. The path forward exists—for both of you.
IntroductionBreaking a trauma bond is not about willpower or “just leaving”—it’s a neurological uncoupling process where your brain’s hijacked reward and attachment systems must be gradually rewired to diminish the intense emotional pull toward your abuser. Trauma bonds are a strong emotional attachment that forms through cycles of abuse and manipulation, making it difficult to recognize the unhealthy nature of the relationship. If you’ve ever wondered why you keep going back despite knowing better, the answer lies in your nervous system, not your character.
https://youtu.be/72__B95HvHk
This guide covers the biology of trauma bonding, nervous system regulation strategies, safety planning logistics, and gradual detachment methods. Trauma bonding is rooted in power imbalances, manipulation, and dependency, and it is not a healthy relationship or real love. It’s specifically written for survivors who intellectually understand they need to leave (or have already left) but feel physically pulled back to the abusive person. If your body seems to betray your mind’s decisions, this content addresses exactly why that happens and what to do about it.
The direct answer: You cannot think your way out of a trauma bond—you must regulate your way out. Trauma bonds are a psychological response to cycles of abuse, often leaving victims feeling trapped in a cycle of manipulation and dependency. Breaking free requires soothing your nervous system first, because when your body is in panic mode, it will seek what feels familiar, even when that familiarity is harmful.
By the end of this guide, you will:
- Understand why trauma bond withdrawal symptoms mirror drug withdrawal
- Know how to implement no contact safely using a titration approach
- Master regulation tools for moments when the urge to contact them feels overwhelming
- Create a comprehensive safety plan protecting both your emotional and physical well being
- Build “islands of safety” that support lasting freedom from unhealthy relationship dynamics
Understanding Trauma Bonds and Your Nervous SystemA trauma bond is a powerful emotional attachment formed through cycles of abuse and intermittent positive reinforcement. Trauma bonds can form in romantic relationships, but also in friendships, family dynamics, and workplace settings. In romantic relationships, trauma bonding is especially prevalent when emotional or physical abuse is present, often involving cycles of violence and reconciliation.
Healthy relationships are characterized by mutual respect, trust, support, open communication, and accountability. In a healthy relationship, both partners feel valued and secure. A trauma bond is not a healthy relationship and is not real love.
Unlike healthy relationships built on consistent safety and mutual respect, trauma bonded relationships exploit your survival instincts through unpredictable swings between harm and affection. Trauma bonds are often marked by secrecy, blame-shifting, and cycles of abuse. Your nervous system becomes hijacked—interpreting the abusive person as a source of safety precisely because they occasionally provide relief from the very distress they create.
The Neurochemical RealityThe intense emotional bond in abusive relationships functions like an addiction. Emotional abuse, including manipulation and gaslighting, plays a central role in the formation of trauma bonds by isolating victims, undermining their perceptions, and fostering deep attachment through a cycle of abuse and positive reinforcement. When your abuser showers you with affection after periods of emotional or physical abuse, your brain releases dopamine—the same neurochemical involved in gambling and substance addiction. This intermittent reinforcement creates stronger attachment than consistent kindness ever could. Research on conditioning shows that unpredictable rewards cement behaviors more powerfully than reliable ones, which explains why the cycle of love bombing followed by cruelty creates such deep emotional attachment.
This neurochemical reality is precisely why “just leave” advice fails. Your nervous system has been conditioned to seek the familiar pattern. The abuser’s presence—despite evidence of harm—registers as safety to your dysregulated brain. Understanding this removes self blame from the equation: your difficulty leaving isn’t weakness, it’s biology responding to sophisticated conditioning.
Trauma bonds are also linked to attachment theory, which explains how early childhood experiences shape our relationships. The trauma bonding cycle typically includes stages such as love bombing, trust and dependency, criticism, gaslighting, resignation, loss of self, and addiction to the cycle.
Why Your Body Betrays Your MindIn a trauma bonded relationship, your fight-flight-freeze responses become chronically activated. Your amygdala—the brain’s fear center—remains on high alert, while your prefrontal cortex—responsible for rational thinking—gets overridden. When you’re in this survival state, you cannot make clear decisions. Your body craves regulation, and tragically, the abuser has become your primary source of nervous system relief through those intermittent positive feelings.
This creates a devastating loop: the stress of being apart triggers panic, which your body interprets as evidence that you need the abuser to feel safe again. The victim feels powerless not from lack of intelligence or strength, but because decision-making capacity genuinely diminishes when the nervous system is dysregulated. This is why breaking the bond requires addressing physiology first—and why withdrawal symptoms emerge so intensely when you attempt to leave.
The Biology of Withdrawal: Why Breaking Free HurtsThe emotional pain of ending a trauma bonded relationship isn’t imagined or exaggerated—it’s a genuine neurochemical withdrawal process. Understanding this biology helps reframe the experience: the agony isn’t evidence that you belong together, it’s evidence that your brain is detoxing from an unhealthy pattern.
Physical Withdrawal SymptomsTrauma bond withdrawal symptoms manifest in the body with surprising intensity. Survivors commonly report panic attacks, insomnia, digestive disturbances, chest tightness, and chronic pain flares. Your cortisol levels, elevated during abuse and soothed during reconciliation phases, now swing erratically without the familiar cycle. These physical symptoms typically peak around 2-4 weeks after separation, similar to timelines seen in substance withdrawal. Your body is genuinely recalibrating its stress response systems.
Emotional Withdrawal SymptomsThe emotional turmoil during this period can feel unbearable. Obsessive thoughts about the abuser consume hours. Intense feelings of longing arise unexpectedly. You may experience emotional numbness alternating with overwhelming grief. Negative thoughts flood in, including self doubt about whether the relationship was really “that bad.” These intense emotional experiences are withdrawal—your brain protesting the absence of its conditioned reward source.
The Dopamine CrashHere’s the reframe that changes everything: that overwhelming urge to text them is a dopamine craving, not evidence of love. When you feel desperate to make contact, your brain is essentially asking for a hit—like a gambler pulled toward the slot machine despite knowing the odds. Genuine connection doesn’t require cycles of fear and relief. The intense longing you feel reflects addiction patterns, not the deep sense of partnership that characterizes healthy relationships.
Studies show that intermittent reinforcement creates stronger behavioral patterns than consistent reward. This is why the abuser’s unpredictability—terrible one day, wonderful the next—bonded you more intensely than a stable partner ever could have. Recognizing withdrawal for what it is allows you to ride it out rather than interpret it as a signal to return.
The “No Contact” Rule: Necessary Detox for Your Nervous SystemNo contact functions as full abstinence from an addictive substance. Without it, even minimal interaction reactivates the neural pathways reinforced by your trauma bonded relationship. Checking their social media, responding to “just one” message, or allowing them to explain themselves provides just enough of a dopamine hit to reset your withdrawal timeline and keep you trapped in emotional addiction.
However, abrupt severance isn’t always possible or safe. For some survivors, immediate complete separation can trigger panic responses so severe that they rush back to the familiar abuser. This is where titration—a gradual, stepped approach—becomes essential for sustainable freedom.
The Titration Approach: Building Islands of SafetyRather than demanding you break a trauma bond all at once, titration allows you to build small “islands of safety” that gradually expand until the abuser’s pull diminishes.
- Remove photos and mementos from immediate environment — Clear visual triggers from your daily spaces first, storing items out of sight or with a trusted friend
- Block on social media and messaging platforms — Eliminate the temptation to check their activity or respond to hoovering attempts
- Change routines to avoid accidental encounters — Take different routes, shop at different stores, adjust your schedule to minimize overlap
- Inform trusted friends about your no-contact commitment — Accountability creates external structure when internal resolve wavers
- Create physical barriers when necessary — New phone numbers, email addresses, or even relocating if resources allow
Each step creates distance, allowing your nervous system time to adjust before the next change. This prevents overwhelming your system and triggering the panic that sends you back.
When Complete No Contact Isn’t PossibleShared custody, workplace overlap, or family ties may prevent total separation. In these cases, structured approaches minimize harm while protecting your mental health.
| Factor | Grey Rock Method | Structured Contact | | --- | --- | --- | | Communication style | Bland, boring, unreactive | Formal, documented, business-like | | Best for | Manipulative behavior, narcissistic abuse | Shared custody, legal proceedings | | Goal | Become uninteresting to the abuser | Minimize interaction to essential logistics | | Emotional protection | High—denies supply | Moderate—requires ongoing regulation | | Documentation | Optional | Essential for safety |
Both approaches require consistent nervous system regulation practices, as even limited exposure can trigger trauma symptoms and withdrawal patterns.
Nervous System Regulation Tools: Your Daily ToolkitYou cannot process trauma or make clear decisions while your nervous system is dysregulated. Regulation must happen before rational thinking can take hold. These tools don’t require the abuser—they build your capacity to create safety within yourself.
5 Immediate Grounding Techniques for When You Want to Text Them1. Box Breathing (4-4-4-4 Count) Inhale for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, exhale for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds. Repeat for 5 minutes minimum. This technique activates your parasympathetic nervous system and can reduce cortisol by 20-30% within minutes. When the urge to contact them hits, set a timer for 5 minutes and breathe before making any decision.
2. 5-4-3-2-1 Sensory Grounding Name 5 things you can see, 4 you can touch, 3 you can hear, 2 you can smell, and 1 you can taste. This method anchors you in present-moment safety, interrupting the dissociation and emotional flooding that precede impulsive contact. Research shows it’s effective for approximately 80% of trauma survivors.
3. Cold Water Face Plunge or Ice Cube Technique Splash cold water on your face or hold ice cubes in your hands. This activates the mammalian dive reflex, immediately interrupting panic responses and reducing heart rate within 30 seconds. Keep ice readily available during high-risk periods.
4. Bilateral Stimulation Practice butterfly hugs (crossing arms over chest, alternately tapping shoulders) or alternating toe taps. This bilateral stimulation engages both brain hemispheres, helping integrate intense emotional experiences and reducing the urge’s intensity.
5. Safe Person Speed Dial Pre-arrange with 3 trusted supporters that you can call when overwhelmed. Voice connection releases oxytocin, providing healthy co-regulation. Before the crisis hits, identify your support network and get explicit agreement to be your emergency contact during these moments.
Daily Nervous System Regulation PracticesMorning regulation routine: Before checking any devices, spend 10 minutes in regulation. This might include box breathing, gentle stretching, or positive self talk affirmations. Starting regulated creates resilience for the day’s challenges.
Midday check-ins: Set 2-3 alarms to pause and assess your nervous system state. Ask: Am I holding tension? Is my breathing shallow? A brief grounding practice prevents dysregulation from accumulating throughout the day.
Evening wind-down: Avoid abuser-related content before bed. Instead, practice self care through calming activities that promote restorative sleep—the foundation for emotional regulation and mental health recovery.
The Safety Plan: Logistics of Leaving and Staying SafeA safety plan addresses both emotional and physical protection. In domestic violence situations, leaving is statistically the most dangerous period—proper planning literally saves lives. This isn’t about being paranoid; it’s about honoring the reality of risk while building healthy boundaries.
Emotional Safety PlanningIdentifying triggers and responses: Document specific situations that trigger intense urges to reconnect. For each trigger, identify a pre-planned coping strategy. This removes decision-making from crisis moments when your capacity is diminished. Practicing self-compassion is crucial here—treat yourself with kindness and use positive self-talk to counter internalized blame. Challenging self-blame involves reframing negative thoughts, such as replacing “I deserved this” with “I deserve respect and kindness.”
Creating a crisis plan: When regulation techniques aren’t enough, what’s next? Identify a safe space you can go to, a mental health professional to contact, and support groups for survivors of psychological abuse who understand what you’re experiencing.
Building a support team: Assign specific roles—one friend for middle-of-night calls, another for practical logistics, perhaps family members for emotional support. Distribute responsibility so no single person becomes overwhelmed and so you never feel like the only person who can help is the abuser.
Physical Safety PlanningDocumentation strategies: If abuse is ongoing, safely document incidents with dates, descriptions, and photographs where possible. Store documentation in a location the abuser cannot access—a trusted friend’s home, a secure digital account, or through domestic violence shelters.
Emergency preparation: Pack an emergency bag with essentials (ID, medications, money, phone charger) and store it outside your home if possible. Identify safe locations you can go immediately if needed.
Legal considerations: Research restraining order processes in your jurisdiction. Many domestic violence organizations offer advocates who can guide you through legal protections without cost. Knowledge of options builds the deep sense of agency essential for personal growth.
Healthy Boundaries: Reclaiming Your Space and PowerEstablishing healthy boundaries is a transformative step in breaking a trauma bond and reclaiming your sense of autonomy. In a trauma bonded relationship, boundaries are often blurred or violated, leaving you feeling powerless and unsure of where you end and the other person begins. Relearning how to set and maintain healthy boundaries is essential for breaking free from the cycle of control and manipulation.
Healthy boundaries mean clearly defining what is and isn’t acceptable in your interactions—physically, emotionally, and mentally. This might look like limiting or ending contact with the abuser, refusing to engage in conversations that leave you feeling unsafe, or asserting your right to privacy and personal space. It also means honoring your own needs and feelings, even if you were taught to ignore them in the past.
Setting boundaries can feel uncomfortable at first, especially if you’ve been conditioned to put the abuser’s needs above your own. Start small: practice saying “no” to requests that drain you, or take time for yourself without guilt. Remember, boundaries are not about punishing the other person—they’re about protecting your well-being and creating the conditions for healthy relationships in the future.
As you practice setting healthy boundaries, you’ll notice a gradual shift in your self-esteem and sense of control. Each boundary you set is a step toward breaking the trauma bond and reclaiming your power.
Self-Care and Trauma Recovery: Nurturing Your Healing Body and MindSelf-care is not a luxury—it’s a lifeline when recovering from the emotional pain of a trauma bond. The aftermath of an abusive relationship can leave you feeling depleted, anxious, and overwhelmed by trauma symptoms. Prioritizing self-care helps you rebuild your strength, manage stress, and nurture your overall well-being.
Self-care can take many forms, and it’s important to find what feels restorative for you. Physical self-care might include gentle exercise, nourishing meals, or getting enough sleep. Emotional self-care could involve journaling, practicing mindfulness, or engaging in creative activities that bring you joy. Even small acts, like taking a walk in nature or listening to calming music, can help soothe your nervous system and provide relief from emotional pain.
Developing coping skills is a key part of self-care. When triggers or difficult emotions arise, having a toolkit of healthy strategies—such as deep breathing, grounding exercises, or reaching out to a trusted friend—can make a significant difference in your recovery. Over time, these practices help you process trauma, reduce negative feelings, and foster a more compassionate relationship with yourself.
Remember, self-care is not selfish. It’s an essential part of healing from a trauma bonded relationship and building the resilience needed to break free and move forward.
Support Systems and Trauma: Why You Can’t Do This AloneBreaking a trauma bond is one of the most challenging journeys you can undertake—and it’s not meant to be done in isolation. A strong support system is crucial for your mental health and recovery, providing the emotional support and encouragement needed to break free from the grip of an abusive relationship.
Support can come from many sources: trusted friends, family members, support groups, or a mental health professional experienced in trauma therapy. These connections offer a safe space to share your experiences, validate your feelings, and remind you that you’re not alone. Support groups, in particular, can be a lifeline—connecting you with others who truly understand the complexities of trauma bonding and can offer empathy without judgment.
Building a support system may feel daunting, especially if the abuser isolated you from others. Start by reaching out to one safe person or exploring local or online support groups for survivors of emotional or physical abuse. Over time, these relationships can help you rebuild trust, gain perspective, and develop the confidence to set healthy boundaries and pursue personal growth.
Remember, seeking support is a sign of strength, not weakness. With a strong support system in place, you’ll have the foundation you need to heal, process trauma, and create a future filled with healthy relationships and mutual respect.
Common Challenges and SolutionsRecovery from a trauma bonded relationship rarely follows a straight line. Anticipating obstacles allows you to navigate them without interpreting struggles as evidence that you should return.
Trauma bonding healing is a process that involves seeking therapy, building a support network, and learning to prioritize self-care as you recover from unhealthy attachment dynamics.
The Abuser Returns with Love BombingWhen the abuser showers you with attention, gifts, and promises of change, your dopamine system lights up. This is the hook—the intermittent reinforcement that created the bond in the first place.
Solution: Recognize love bombing as part of the cycle, not evidence of genuine change. Use pre-planned responses (“I’m not available to discuss this”) and immediately employ regulation techniques. Remember: the urge to respond is craving, not love.
Intense Loneliness and IsolationAbusive relationships often systematically destroy outside connections. The absence of the abuser can feel like profound emptiness when they’ve become your primary emotional connection.
Solution: Schedule social connections proactively—don’t wait until you feel desperate. Join support groups specifically for trauma bond survivors where others understand without judgment. Seeking support isn’t weakness; it’s the foundation for building healthy relationships in the future.
Self-Doubt and Gaslighting RecoveryNegative beliefs implanted through psychological abuse persist long after separation. You may question your memories, minimize the abusive behavior, or convince yourself things weren’t that bad.
Solution: Daily reality anchoring through journaling helps counter gaslighting effects. Write specific incidents with details. Regular check-ins with trusted friends who witnessed the relationship can restore accurate perspective. Trauma focused therapy and trauma informed therapy specifically address these lasting cognitive distortions.
Building Your Exit Strategy: Next StepsBreaking a trauma bond requires nervous system healing, not willpower. You’re not weak for struggling—you’re experiencing a genuine neurological process that takes time and support to overcome. The path forward is through regulation, safety planning, and gradual expansion of your islands of safety.
Immediate next steps:
- Choose one regulation technique from this guide and practice it today, before you need it in crisis
- Identify one safe person and explicitly ask if they’re willing to be your support contact
- Schedule a consultation with a mental health professional experienced in trauma therapy
- Seek professional help, such as therapy or counseling, to support you through the emotional challenges of breaking a trauma bond
For deeper support:
Trauma informed therapy options include EMDR, somatic experiencing, and specialized narcissistic abuse recovery programs. Mental health treatment accelerates healing by processing past trauma that may have created vulnerability to toxic relationships in the first place.
Breaking free can be stronger with help. At Therapevo Counselling, we specialize in helping survivors build safety plans that protect both heart and body. Our trauma-focused approach honors the reality that leaving is a process, not an event—and that your nervous system needs support to find its way home to safety.
Book a free consultation to start your exit strategy. You don’t have to navigate this alone.
Restoring your identity outside the relationship is crucial for long-term recovery from trauma bonding.
You know what they did. You can list every lie, every late night, every moment you were gaslit into doubting your own gut. And still your body wakes at 3 a.m. reaching for them. You feel insane. You are not insane. You are caught in a betrayal bond, and what you are experiencing is a documented physiological response that has nothing to do with weakness.
A betrayal bond is the neurochemical and emotional attachment that forms to a partner who has shattered your reality through deliberate secrecy, gaslighting, and partial disclosures. The cycle of discovery, false reconciliation, and new betrayal hijacks your dopamine system the same way intermittent reinforcement powers a slot machine. Your brain wasn’t designed to process a primary attachment figure who is also the source of ongoing harm, so it builds a bridge across the impossibility. That bridge is the bond. It feels like love because the same hormones are involved, but its mechanics are closer to addiction than to connection.
This article focuses on betrayal bonds in the specific context of infidelity and sexual betrayal, not general abusive relationships or narcissistic personality disorder dynamics, though there is real overlap. If you are past the initial shock of discovery and stuck in the agonizing loop of “I know what they did, so why can’t I leave?”, you are in the right place. The reason matters, because understanding the biology underneath your bond is the first step toward getting solid ground back under your feet.
What a Betrayal Bond Actually IsA betrayal bond differs from other trauma bonds through the specific mechanics of secrecy, gaslighting, and reality distortion. While emotional abuse in other contexts often involves overt control or love bombing cycles, betrayal trauma operates through hidden lives. The person sleeping next to you was simultaneously someone else entirely. This creates a unique hell where the abuser is also the person you turn to for comfort.
Trauma bonding is often confused with codependency, but the two are not the same thing. Codependency involves an excessive emotional reliance on a partner, typically one who needs support due to illness or addiction. Trauma bonding is rooted in cycles of betrayal and repair, where the bond is formed and re-formed through repeated violations of trust. The bond forms not despite the betrayal but because of it. Your brain, desperate to maintain primary attachment to someone essential for your emotional survival, builds bridges across impossible chasms of cognitive dissonance.
For a deeper look at how this trauma reshapes brain chemistry and physiology, our companion guide on how betrayal trauma impacts the brain and body walks through the neurobiological changes in detail.
The Reality GapThe Reality Gap is the agony of holding two opposing truths about the same person. The partner who held you last night. The person who was texting their affair partner this morning. These realities cannot coexist, yet they must, because they are both true.
Your brain cannot tolerate this dissonance for long. The trauma bond becomes the bridge your mind constructs to connect these two people into one bearable reality. You find yourself making excuses, minimizing, or dissociating because the alternative, holding the full truth, feels like psychological annihilation. This is not denial. This is your brain doing exactly what it was designed to do when attachment and danger come from the same source.
Betrayal Blindness as Survival MechanismBetrayal blindness, a concept developed by researcher Jennifer Freyd, is not naivety or stupidity. It is a survival mechanism. Your brain actively inhibits conscious awareness of betrayal cues to preserve your primary attachment.
When you are emotionally dependent on someone for stability, identity, or daily life, especially in long-term marriage or relationships with shared children and resources, your brain calculates that full awareness of betrayal would be catastrophic. So it blocks the red flags. The suspicious phone behavior, the emotional distance, the gut feeling that something was wrong. Your mind dismissed these not because you were foolish, but because seeing them clearly would have required ending the relationship. Research shows betrayal blindness is strongest when dependency is highest, which is why so many betrayed partners say “I knew something was wrong but I couldn’t let myself see it.”
This mechanism protected you once. Now it keeps you bonded to someone who continues to manipulate your reality.
The Biology of the Betrayal BondYour intellectual knowledge that this person hurt you does not override your body’s physiological attachment. Understanding why your body still wants them is essential for healing, and for releasing the shame that you “should” be able to just leave. The intense symptoms a betrayal bond produces are often similar to PTSD, and they need to be treated with that level of seriousness, not dismissed as overreaction.
Neurochemical Addiction to the CycleThe cycle of discovery, confrontation, partial disclosure, reconciliation, and new discoveries creates a neurochemical rollercoaster that mimics addiction. When your partner shows remorse after you discover another lie, your brain floods with oxytocin (the bonding hormone) and dopamine (the reward chemical). The relief feels like love. The connection feels real.
Patrick Carnes, in his book The Betrayal Bond, describes how fear and terror from discovered infidelity paradoxically amplify attachment hormones. Your brain is not malfunctioning. It is responding to intermittent reinforcement, the most powerful conditioning schedule known to psychology. The same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive makes your betrayer feel impossible to leave.
This is a physiological response to manipulation, not a character flaw. Studies show 70 to 80 percent of infidelity survivors report addiction-like symptoms including withdrawal, cravings, and intrusive thoughts about their partner. Your symptoms are normal responses to abnormal treatment.
The Torture of Trickle TruthTrickle truth, when an unfaithful partner reveals affair details incrementally over weeks or months, is one of the cruelest reinforcers of betrayal bonds. First they admit emotional connection. Weeks later, physical intimacy. Months later, the timeline was longer than disclosed. Each partial truth creates a micro-cycle of devastation and relief.
The hope that “this time they told me everything” becomes its own addiction. Each disclosure feels like progress, like honesty, like the relationship might survive. Gratitude floods your system. Then another truth emerges, retraumatizing you while simultaneously reinforcing the bond through the same intermittent reinforcement that powers slot machine psychology.
Clinical experience suggests roughly 60 to 70 percent of unfaithful partners engage in trickle truth, prolonging their partner’s recovery by 6 to 12 months compared to full disclosure. The betrayal bond strengthens with each cycle, not despite the pain, but because of the unpredictable alternation between hope and devastation.
Stress Response System HijackingBetrayal trauma dysregulates your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, keeping cortisol chronically elevated. This is not anxiety in the normal sense. This is your body trapped in survival mode, unable to distinguish between past and present danger.
Elevated cortisol impairs memory consolidation (which explains the gaps in your recall), disrupts decision-making, and keeps your nervous system cycling between hypervigilance and collapse. When well-meaning friends ask “why don’t you just leave?”, they don’t understand that your brain is essentially offline for major life decisions. The fear response that was designed to protect you from acute threat is now firing continuously, making any change feel like mortal danger.
This is why you feel frozen. This is why leaving feels impossible even when staying feels like hell.
What Betrayal Bonds Look Like in Real LifeSometimes naming the abstract dynamic isn’t enough. You want to know if what you’re living is what we’re describing. These are composites drawn from what we see clinically, with identifying details changed. If any of them sound like a transcript of your last week, that is information, not coincidence.
The midnight check. She has discovered three new lies in the past two months. She knows the pattern. She also opens his location app every time he leaves the house, and the moment the dot shows him at home, her chest releases. She hates that the relief feels so good. The relief is not love. It is the dopamine that follows fear.
The “this time he means it” loop. He has promised six times that the disclosure is finally complete. Each promise is followed by months of cautious hope, then a polygraph fail or a new artifact discovered on a hard drive, then devastation, then a new promise. She knows intellectually that the pattern is predictive. She still believes him every time. That is the intermittent reinforcement at work, and it is doing exactly what it does to every nervous system it gets hold of.
The good day that erases the year. They have a quiet Saturday. Coffee, a walk, a long talk where he says the right things. By Sunday night she catches herself thinking, “Maybe none of it was as bad as I thought.” That is the bond rewriting the file. A single regulated day flooding with bonding hormones can temporarily neutralize months of accumulated evidence. This is not you being naive. It is your brain protecting the attachment.
The body that won’t agree with the decision. She has signed the separation paperwork. She knows it is right. She also lies awake reaching across the bed for him and crying when she remembers he isn’t there. Her conscious mind and her nervous system are not on the same timeline. The mind decides in minutes. The body unbonds over many months.
If you saw yourself in any of these, the work is not to shame the pattern. It is to recognize that the pattern is the bond announcing itself, and to start building the conditions where the bond can actually loosen.
Breaking Free Through StabilizationYou cannot make clear decisions about your relationship while your nervous system is hijacked. Stabilization must come before any major choices. Not because the relationship might be saved, not because it can’t be saved, but because you deserve to make decisions from a place of mental health rather than trauma response.
Recognition and Awareness PracticesBreaking betrayal bonds begins with recognizing when they are activated:
- Identify the signal in your body. Notice when you feel the pull toward contact: chest tightness, anxiety, desperate longing. Name it. “This is the bond activating.”
- Track your triggers. Keep a simple log of when cravings for connection spike. Patterns emerge, often after silence, after new information, or after seeing them with the children.
- Practice grounding techniques. When activated, use physical anchoring: feet on floor, cold water on wrists, naming five things you can see. This shifts your nervous system from survival mode to present awareness.
- Build body awareness through movement. Gentle exercise, yoga, or tai chi can help regulate a dysregulated nervous system over time.
The goal is not to stop feeling. It’s to recognize that feelings are not facts and urges are not commands.
Reality Testing MethodsBetrayal blindness distorts your ability to distinguish between hopes and behavior. Reality testing creates external anchors:
- Behavior-only journaling. Record only what your partner does, not what they promise or what you hope. Review weekly for patterns.
- Timeline documentation. Write down disclosed truths with dates. When new information emerges, you have concrete evidence of trickle truth rather than gaslighting yourself into believing you “misremembered.”
- Seek external perspective. A therapist specializing in betrayal trauma, or trusted family and friends who knew you before the relationship, can reflect reality back when your perception is compromised.
This is not about building a case for divorce. It’s about having solid ground to stand on when someone has deliberately made your reality shift.
Healthy Attachment vs. Betrayal Bond AttachmentUnderstanding the difference between secure connection and trauma bonding helps you recognize what you are experiencing:
| Dimension | Healthy Attachment | Betrayal Bond Attachment | | --- | --- | --- | | Trust Pattern | Consistent, built through reliability | Broken and “rebuilt” repeatedly through promises | | Neurochemistry | Steady oxytocin from mutual respect | Dopamine spikes from intermittent reinforcement | | Conflict Response | Repair and understanding | Gaslighting, minimization, blame-shifting | | Emotional Safety | Predictable, can express needs | Walking on eggshells, hypervigilance | | Identity | Maintained and respected | Eroded, dependent on partner’s validation | | Stress Levels | Low cortisol, regulated nervous system | Chronic cortisol elevation, PTSD-like symptoms | | Control Dynamics | Shared power, mutual influence | Power imbalance, information control | | Communication | Transparent, honest | Secrecy, partial truths, manipulation |
If the right column describes your relationship, this does not mean you are weak or that love isn’t real. It means the bond is built on trauma, not trust. Research shows secure attachment correlates with 20 to 30 percent depression rates. Trauma-bonded relationships correlate with 50 to 70 percent.
Common Challenges and SolutionsBreaking free from a betrayal bond creates specific obstacles that require targeted solutions.
Fear of Being Alone vs. Fear of More BetrayalYou may feel trapped between two terrors: the unknown of life without your partner, and the known hell of more discoveries. This is not indecision. This is two legitimate fears in conflict.
Solution: Focus on building internal safety before making external changes. This means developing a relationship with yourself that doesn’t depend on your partner’s behavior. Individual treatment with a trauma-informed therapist creates a sense of self separate from the marriage. You are not choosing between staying and leaving. You are choosing to become someone who can survive either outcome.
Pressure to “Forgive and Move On”Family, friends, and religious communities often pressure betrayed partners toward premature forgiveness, treating healing as a timeline rather than a process.
Solution: Distinguish between genuine healing and pressure to perform normalcy. Forgiveness that comes before safety is not forgiveness. It’s self-abandonment. Some scripts that help with well-meaning pressure:
- “I appreciate your concern. I’m working with a specialist on my healing timeline.”
- “Forgiveness may be part of my future, but safety comes first.”
- “I’m not able to talk about my marriage right now. Thank you for respecting that.”
You do not owe anyone a healed appearance while you are still in trauma response.
Self-Blame and Shame Spirals“I should have known.” “Why can’t I just leave?” “What’s wrong with me that I still love them?”
These thoughts are symptoms of betrayal trauma, not truths about your character. The cycle of self-blame keeps you dependent on your partner for validation and relief, which is exactly what the bond requires to survive.
Solution: Cognitive restructuring specific to betrayal. When you notice blame thoughts, name them as trauma symptoms. Replace “I should have seen it” with “Betrayal blindness was protecting me.” Replace “I’m weak for staying” with “My nervous system is responding to intermittent reinforcement the way every human brain does.” Shame loses power when you recognize it as part of the trauma rather than the truth about who you are.
Conclusion and Next StepsHealing from betrayal trauma requires stabilization before any decisions about your relationship’s future. You cannot think clearly while your nervous system is hijacked. You cannot trust your own perception while reality keeps shifting through trickle truth. The bond feels like love, but love does not require you to lose yourself.
Immediate next steps:
- Create safety. This may mean physical separation, but it always means emotional boundaries around information flow and contact patterns.
- Seek specialized support. General therapists may not understand betrayal trauma. Find someone trained in this specific intersection of trauma and infidelity.
- Connect with community. Betrayal trauma support groups provide reality-testing and reduce isolation. The shared experience of others helps normalize what you are going through.
Related topics for continued healing include formal disclosure processes with therapeutic support, attachment repair work (when both partners commit to recovery), and individual trauma treatment for childhood trauma that may have created vulnerability to these relationship patterns.
You cannot heal a reality that is still shifting. Our specialists can help you find solid ground. Book a free consultation to start your stabilization process.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat is a betrayal bond?A betrayal bond is the neurochemical and emotional attachment that forms to a partner who has caused you significant harm through deceit, infidelity, or repeated boundary violations. The cycle of discovery, reconciliation, and new betrayal triggers the same intermittent reinforcement that drives addiction. Your dopamine and oxytocin systems get hijacked, which is why the attachment can feel even stronger after each new wound. Patrick Carnes coined the term in his 1997 book of the same name, and the concept is now widely recognized in betrayal trauma treatment.
How is a betrayal bond different from love?Healthy love is built on consistent reliability, transparent communication, and a regulated nervous system. A betrayal bond is built on cycles of harm and relief, where the relief itself becomes the reinforcer. Love grows when you feel safe with someone. A betrayal bond grows when you feel unsafe with someone and they intermittently restore the feeling of safety. Both can produce intense feelings, but the underlying mechanics are opposites.
How long does it take to break a betrayal bond?There is no fixed timeline, but most clients in specialized betrayal trauma treatment see meaningful nervous system regulation within 6 to 12 months of consistent work, with the deeper bond loosening over 18 to 36 months. The biggest variable is whether the betraying partner is still actively engaging in trickle truth or new betrayals. As long as new wounds are arriving, the bond keeps re-forming. Stabilization always comes first, decisions later.
Can a betrayal bond be broken without leaving the relationship?Yes, but only under specific conditions. The betraying partner must commit to full disclosure (typically through a formal therapeutic disclosure process), demonstrate sustained behavioral change over time, and accept that rebuilding trust is the betrayed partner’s timeline, not theirs. If those conditions are not present, the bond will continue to re-form even inside the marriage. Stabilization for the betrayed spouse is non-negotiable either way.
Why do I miss them when I know what they did?Because your nervous system and your knowledge are not on the same timeline. Your conscious mind processed the betrayal in days or weeks. Your body, which was attached through years of shared life, oxytocin, sex, parenting, and routine, unbonds in months or years. Missing them is not evidence that the relationship was good. It is evidence that you are human, and that the bond your body built was real. The work is not to argue your body out of missing them. It is to give your body the regulation and external reality-testing it needs to slowly let go.
Safety DisclaimerIf you are in immediate danger, call 911.
Domestic violence is a life-threatening situation. The most dangerous time is often when you attempt to leave—75% of DV murders occur after the victim tries to separate from their abuser.
National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE)
This resource is available 24/7 with trained advocates who understand trauma bonding and can help you create a safety plan. You are not weak for staying. Biology and psychology create powerful traps that make leaving extremely difficult.
Introduction“I’m staying to keep the family together.”
We hear this from protective parents every week. And we need you to understand something that changes everything: in a domestic violence home, the “family glue” holding everyone together is not love. It is shared trauma.
This article speaks directly to two groups: the protective parent who may feel stuck in an impossible situation due to emotional entrapment within a trauma bond, and the adult child trying to understand why their childhood felt like walking through a minefield while pretending everything was fine. We see the impossible choice you feel you are making every day.
https://youtu.be/6v4-NHCQS9E
Trauma bonding in domestic violence creates survival attachments that feel like love but are actually fear-based. These bonds form through cycles of abuse and affection, hijacking your brain’s attachment system until the relationship feels impossible to leave—even when you know you should.
Trauma bonds are often formed through a combination of emotional manipulation, isolation, and gaslighting by the abuser.
This content covers how trauma bonding works within family systems, not just between partners. We’ll examine the biological imperative driving children to bond with scary caregivers, the intermittent reinforcement trapping partners, and the generational patterns that repeat until someone breaks free.
By the end, you will understand:
- Why trauma bonds feel like love but operate like addiction
- How children develop “fawning” as a survival response to abuse
- The neurochemical trap of intermittent reinforcement in abusive relationships
- The critical difference between protecting your children and enabling the cycle
- Concrete steps to break the generational pattern of domestic abuse
Understanding Trauma Bonding in Family SystemsTrauma bonding is a strong, unhealthy emotional attachment formed between an abused person and their abuser through cycles of abuse interspersed with affection, kindness, or reconciliation. This creates a psychological dependency that mimics love but stems from survival instincts.
In family systems, trauma bonding extends beyond the abusive partner to include children. The power imbalance between parent and child creates fertile ground for dysfunctional attachment—abuse followed by relief, terror followed by tenderness. This intermittent reinforcement makes separation feel impossible because your brain has learned to associate the abuser with both danger and safety.
Unlike healthy relationships built on consistent trust and respect, trauma bond relationships rely on fear and relief cycles. During “honeymoon” phases, your brain releases bonding hormones like oxytocin, reinforcing loyalty despite harm. This is not a character flaw. This is neurobiology.
The Biological Imperative of Child AttachmentChildren must bond to their caregivers to survive. This is not optional—it is biological programming that predates conscious thought.
When the person responsible for a child’s survival is also the source of terror, the child’s brain faces an impossible equation. The solution? Create a “shared reality” with the abuser. Adopt their version of events. Believe their explanations. This is not weakness; it is the brain’s attempt to reduce stress in an impossible situation.
This survival mechanism is called “fawning”—the fourth trauma response alongside fight, flight, and freeze. Fawning involves people-pleasing, hyper-attentiveness to the abuser’s moods, and suppressing your own needs to avoid triggering violence. Children who fawn become expert at reading the room, anticipating rage, and making themselves small or useful to stay safe.
Intermittent Reinforcement in Adult RelationshipsPartners in abusive relationships experience trauma bonding through intermittent reinforcement—the same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive.
Abusers use positive reinforcement—such as affection or praise—intermittently to manipulate and maintain control, deepening the trauma bond.
Unpredictable rewards create stronger attachment than consistent love. When your abusive partner alternates between cruelty and tenderness, your brain experiences dopamine surges during the “good times” that feel more intense than steady affection ever could. You find yourself chasing those positive feelings, convinced the real relationship is the tender one and the abuse is an aberration.
The cycle typically follows a pattern: love bombing, trust-building, criticism and gaslighting, manipulation, addiction, self-loss, and submission. Each phase serves to deepen the trauma bond while eroding your self-esteem and sense of reality through cognitive dissonance.
Understanding these biological mechanisms is essential before we examine how they manifest differently in partners versus children.
Physical Symptoms of Trauma BondingTrauma bonding doesn’t just affect your emotions and thoughts—it can take a real toll on your body. Many survivors of abusive relationships experience physical symptoms that are directly linked to the ongoing stress and anxiety of trauma. These can include persistent headaches, chronic fatigue, nausea, changes in appetite, and trouble sleeping. Sometimes, the body’s response to trauma is so strong that it interferes with your ability to function in daily life.
These physical symptoms are your body’s way of signaling that something is wrong. The constant cycle of fear, relief, and emotional pain in a trauma bond relationship keeps your nervous system on high alert, making it difficult to relax or feel safe. Over time, this stress can lead to more serious health issues if left unaddressed.
Recognizing these physical symptoms is an important step in your recovery. If you notice that your body is reacting to the relationship or the aftermath of leaving, it’s not “all in your head”—it’s a real response to trauma. Seeking help from a mental health professional can make a significant difference. They can help you develop strategies to reduce stress and anxiety, manage physical symptoms, and support your overall mental health as you heal from trauma bonding.
Love Bombing and Trauma BondingLove bombing is a powerful tactic used by abusers to create an intense emotional attachment at the start of a relationship. It often involves overwhelming the victim with affection, compliments, gifts, and promises of a perfect future. These grand gestures and positive feelings can make the relationship feel like a whirlwind romance—until the abuse begins.
The reason love bombing is so effective in creating trauma bonds is that it activates the brain’s reward system, flooding you with dopamine and other feel-good chemicals. This rush of positive feelings can make it hard to recognize the warning signs of abuse or to believe that the abuser’s actions are intentional. When the cycle shifts from affection to abuse, survivors often find themselves longing for the return of those early, euphoric days.
Abusers use love bombing to manipulate their victims into staying, even after the relationship becomes harmful. The memory of those intense early feelings can keep survivors trapped, hoping the abuser will change and the “real” relationship will return.
Recognizing love bombing is a crucial step in breaking free from trauma bonds. If you notice that someone’s affection feels overwhelming, too good to be true, or is quickly followed by controlling or hurtful behavior, it may be a sign of manipulation. Reaching out for support can help you break the cycle and begin to heal.
The Partner’s Trap: Why You StayYou are not staying because you are weak. You are staying because your nervous system has been systematically rewired to associate this person with survival itself.
The Honeymoon Phase HookLove bombing creates the initial attachment that makes everything afterward so confusing. Your abusive partner likely began the relationship with intense affection, attention, and promises that felt like finally being seen. This creates a powerful template that your brain returns to again and again, even as the abuse escalates.
After episodes of violence or emotional abuse, the “good times” feel exponentially more intense. Your brain, flooded with stress hormones during abuse, experiences a neurochemical flood of relief and bonding chemicals during reconciliation. This is not love—it is your nervous system desperately seeking equilibrium after terror.
This pattern creates what therapists call “euphoric recall”—the tendency to remember the intense feelings of the honeymoon phase while minimizing the reality of the abuse. Your brain is not lying to you maliciously; it is trying to cope with an impossible situation.
Isolation and Dependency CreationAbusers rarely trap partners through force alone. They strategically isolate you from support systems, create financial dependency, and erode your confidence in your own decision-making through coercive control.
By the time you recognize the pattern, you may feel like you have nowhere to go and no one who would believe you. The abuser’s actions have systematically dismantled your independence while gaslighting you about your own perceptions. Self doubt becomes your constant companion.
This isolation serves the trauma bond by making the abuser feel like the only person who truly knows you—even as they hurt you. The attachment deepens precisely because alternatives have been eliminated.
Hope for Change vs. RealityEvery promise to change, every tearful apology, every genuine-seeming moment of remorse reinforces the hope that love can heal the abuser. This belief—that you are the only person who can save them—is part of the trap.
Statistical reality tells a different story. Without sustained professional help and genuine accountability, abusive behaviors rarely change. The cycle of tension, explosion, and honeymoon repeats with increasing intensity. Yet the trauma bond makes each reconciliation phase feel like evidence that this time will be different.
You cannot love someone into being safe. This is not a failure of your love; it is a recognition of what love can and cannot accomplish.
The Child’s Burden: Why They Defend the AbuserChildren in domestic violence homes face a developmental impossibility: the person they depend on for survival is also the source of terror.
Loyalty Through TerrorWhen children experience abuse from a caregiver, their brains cannot process this as “my parent is dangerous.” Instead, they interpret the abuse as their own fault. “Daddy hit me because I was too loud.” “Mom screamed because I didn’t clean my room right.”
This self blame serves a protective function: if the abuse is the child’s fault, then the child has some control. They can try harder, be quieter, be better. The alternative—accepting that their caregiver is unpredictable and dangerous—is too threatening to survival.
Children often develop hyper-responsibility and people-pleasing as coping mechanisms. They become expert at managing the emotional pain of the household, reading moods, and deflecting rage. And they frequently protect the abusive parent, sometimes more vigorously than they protect themselves.
Creating Shared Reality for SurvivalTo survive with a dangerous caregiver, children adopt the abuser’s version of reality. If Dad says the hitting was deserved, the child believes it. If Mom says the family is happy, the child suppresses evidence to the contrary.
This creates distorted thinking patterns that persist into adulthood. Adult children of domestic violence often struggle with anxiety, negative thoughts about themselves, and difficulty recognizing abusive behaviors in their own relationships. They learned that their perceptions were wrong, so they chronically doubt themselves.
In many cases, children in these systems blame the protective parent. If Mom tried to leave, she was “breaking up the family.” If she stayed, she “didn’t protect me.” The child’s cognitive dissonance—needing to believe both parents are safe—often resolves by aligning with the more powerful (and therefore more dangerous) parent.
The Fawning Response in ActionFawning looks like the “easy” child who never causes problems. The child who can read a room’s tension before they fully enter it. The child who manages everyone’s emotions at their own expense.
Examples include:
- Immediately agreeing with everything the abusive parent says
- Anticipating needs before they’re expressed to prevent rage
- Taking responsibility for siblings’ behavior to shield them from abuse
- Becoming the abuser’s confidant or emotional support
Long-term, fawning creates adults who enter codependent relationships, struggle to identify their own needs, and feel responsible for other people’s emotions. The attachment patterns formed in childhood—bonding through fear and relief—become templates for adult relationships.
The Generational Cycle: How Trauma Bonding RepeatsWithout intervention, trauma bonding transmits across generations. Children of domestic violence are three times more likely to experience partner violence as adults—either as perpetrators (having modeled violent behavior) or as victims (seeking the familiar chaos that feels like love).
Unresolved trauma bonds create distorted family systems where intermittent reinforcement feels normal. Adult survivors often describe healthy relationships as “boring” because steady affection doesn’t trigger the neurochemical intensity they learned to associate with love.
Breaking the Cycle Recognition ProcessBreaking free from generational trauma requires conscious effort and usually professional help. Here are the essential steps:
- Recognize trauma bonding vs. healthy attachment: Healthy relationships feature consistent safety, not cycles of fear and relief. If you feel addicted to the relationship or unable to leave despite harm, you may be trauma bonded.
- Understand your role in the family system: Were you the fawner? The scapegoat? The invisible child? Understanding your survival adaptations helps you see them as responses to an impossible situation, not character flaws.
- Identify your trauma responses: Notice when you fight, flee, freeze, or fawn. These automatic responses were protective in your family of origin but may not serve you now.
- Develop a safety plan: Before any other healing work, establish physical and emotional safety. You cannot process trauma while still living in it.
- Create new attachment patterns: Through trauma informed therapy and safe relationships, you can develop secure attachment. This takes time and feels uncomfortable because safety is unfamiliar.
Protecting vs. Enabling ComparisonMany protective parents struggle to understand whether their actions are keeping their children safe or perpetuating the cycle. This table clarifies the difference:
| Situation | Protecting Response | Enabling Response | Why It Matters | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | After an abusive episode | Create physical separation; validate child’s experience; document the abuse | Minimize what happened; tell child to forgive; return to “normal” quickly | Children need their reality confirmed, not denied | | Child defends abuser | Gently acknowledge the child’s love for the parent while naming the behavior as harmful | Agree with child’s defense to avoid conflict; blame yourself | Truth-telling (age-appropriate) builds trust and reality-testing | | Considering leaving | Develop a safety plan with professionals; prioritize children’s long-term wellbeing | Stay “for the children”; believe promises to change without evidence | Children’s safety outcomes improve dramatically when they leave abusive homes | | Abuser apologizes | Require sustained behavior change and professional treatment before any reconciliation | Accept apology immediately; resume relationship as before | Apologies without changed behavior are part of the abuse cycle | | Child shows fear of abuser | Take the fear seriously; seek professional help; create clear boundaries | Reassure child that the abuser “loves them really”; dismiss the fear | Children’s fear responses are accurate survival signals |
The core difference: protecting focuses on actual safety outcomes for children, while enabling prioritizes preserving the relationship or family image. Research shows that children in homes where the protective parent leaves have significantly better mental health outcomes than children where the family “stays together” despite ongoing violence.
Common Challenges in Breaking Trauma BondsThe path out of a trauma bonded relationship is extremely difficult. Understanding common obstacles helps you cope when they arise.
“But They Need Me” MindsetThe belief that you are the only person who can help, love, or save the abuser is a core feature of trauma bonding, not evidence of special love. This codependency keeps you focused on managing the abuser’s actions rather than your own safety.
Reframe: You cannot heal what you did not break. The abuser’s behavior is not your responsibility, and your love cannot change them. Professional help from a mental health professional is the only path to genuine change—and even then, success rates are low without the abuser’s sustained commitment.
Fear of “Breaking Up the Family”In healthy families, members feel safe, respected, and consistently cared for. If your family is held together by fear, intermittent reinforcement, and the suppression of truth, you are not breaking up a family by leaving. You are escaping a hostage situation.
Actionable steps: Redefine “family” as people who are consistently safe, not people connected by blood or marriage. Prioritize your children’s actual safety over the appearance of an intact family unit. Children benefit more from one safe home than two parents in conflict.
Trauma Bond Withdrawal SymptomsWhen a relationship ends with an abuser, you may experience symptoms that mirror addiction withdrawal. This is not evidence that you should return—it is evidence of how deeply trauma bonding works on a neurological level.
Common trauma bond withdrawal symptoms include:
- Intense cravings to contact your former partner
- Physical symptoms: disrupted sleep, appetite changes, anxiety, physical withdrawal symptoms
- Obsessive thoughts about the abuser
- Deep sense of emptiness or loss of identity
- Romanticizing the relationship despite abuse
Timeline expectations: Acute withdrawal typically lasts 2-8 weeks. Full recovery often takes 6-12 months of no contact combined with professional support. The impulse to return is strongest in the first few weeks—having a safety plan and support system in place is essential.
Coping strategies: Focus on self care basics (sleep, food, movement). Reduce stress through grounding techniques. Maintain no contact—every interaction reactivates the trauma bond. Lean on support systems. Seek trauma informed therapy to process the attachment and create new patterns.
Therapy and TreatmentHealing from trauma bonding is possible, and therapy is one of the most effective ways to start that journey. Working with a mental health professional who understands trauma bonding and domestic violence can help you process your experiences, challenge negative thoughts, and develop healthier ways of relating to yourself and others.
Trauma informed therapy is especially helpful, as it creates a safe, supportive environment where your experiences are validated and your healing is prioritized. Approaches like cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) can help you reframe negative thoughts and manage anxiety, while eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy can help you process traumatic memories and reduce their emotional impact.
The goal of therapy is not just to break free from the trauma bond, but to build healthy relationships and a positive sense of self. With the right treatment and support, survivors can move beyond the pain of abuse and create a future defined by safety, respect, and genuine connection.
Creating a Safety PlanA safety plan is a vital tool for anyone trying to break free from trauma bonding and abusive relationships. It’s a personalized, practical strategy designed to protect you from further harm and help you regain control over your life.
Creating a safety plan often starts with setting clear boundaries—deciding what behaviors you will no longer accept and how you will respond if they occur. It also means identifying safe people and places you can turn to in an emergency, such as trusted friends, family members, or a local shelter. A mental health professional can help you tailor your safety plan to your unique situation, ensuring it addresses both physical and emotional safety.
Your safety plan might include steps to reduce stress and anxiety, such as self care routines, exercise, or mindfulness practices. It’s important to have a plan for how to leave quickly if needed, including keeping essential documents and emergency contacts accessible.
Taking steps to create a safety plan is an act of courage and self-respect. It empowers you to break free from trauma bonds, seek support, and begin building healthy relationships. Remember, you don’t have to do this alone—support is available, and every step you take brings you closer to safety and healing.
Conclusion and Next StepsTrauma bonding in domestic violence creates attachments that feel like love but operate like addiction. Whether you are a partner trying to leave or an adult child trying to understand your past, recognize this: staying was not weakness. It was survival. And choosing something different now is not betrayal—it is taking steps toward genuine safety and healing.
Immediate safety planning steps:
- Contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-7233) to speak with a trained advocate
- Identify safe people you can contact in an emergency
- Document abuse when safely possible
- Create a hidden “go bag” with essential documents, medications, and money
- Develop a code word with trusted contacts that signals you need help
- Consult with a domestic violence advocate before announcing any plans to leave
Professional support is essential for breaking trauma bonds. Look for therapists with specific training in domestic violence, complex trauma, and family systems. Individual therapy is typically recommended before any family therapy—you cannot do systems work with an active abuser.
The distinction matters: family therapy assumes all parties are operating in good faith. When one person is using coercive control, family therapy can become another tool of manipulation. Focus on your own healing first.
Additional ResourcesNational Resources:
- National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233
- National Child Abuse Hotline: 1-800-422-4453
- Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741
Professional Support: Therapevo Counselling Inc. specializes in family trauma and high-conflict dynamics. Our therapists understand the neurobiology of trauma bonding and work with both protective parents and adult survivors.
You cannot heal a family system while you are still fighting for survival within it. Let us help you build a safety plan first. Book a free 20-minute consultation with our family trauma experts.
Safety Planning Tools:
- myPlan app (evidence-based safety planning for domestic violence)
- DocuSAFE app (for safely documenting abuse)
Recommended Reading:
- Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft
- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
- Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker
If you feel “crazy” for missing someone who hurts you, or “addicted” to a person you know is harmful, you are not broken. Your brain is responding the way brains tend to respond to a very specific pattern of fear and affection.
A trauma bond is a powerful emotional attachment that forms between a person being abused and their abuser, built through repeated cycles of harm followed by relief, kindness, or apology. The result is a psychological dependency that feels physically impossible to break, even when you can see clearly that the relationship is hurting you.
Safety First: If you are in immediate danger, please contact local emergency services or the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.
https://youtu.be/asszg-U6JB0
This article walks through the neuroscience of trauma bonding, the seven stages that map how these relationships develop, the body and relational signs that you may be in one, and the steps that actually help people break free. We’ve written it for adults who feel stuck in a relationship they know is unhealthy, and who want to understand why leaving feels so much harder than it should.
By the end of this article, you will:
- Understand the brain science behind your emotional attachment
- Recognize the 7 stages of trauma bonding
- Identify the body, relational, and cognitive signs of a trauma bond
- Know the concrete steps to break free and begin healing
What Is a Trauma Bond?A trauma bond is the intense emotional connection that develops between a person experiencing abuse and the person inflicting it. Dr. Patrick Carnes first named this pattern in his 1997 book The Betrayal Bond, describing how cycles of fear and relief misuse the brain’s attachment system to trap a person inside an abusive relationship.
The most important thing to know up front is this: a trauma bond is a neurobiological survival response, not evidence of weakness, low self-worth, or poor judgment. When you are in danger, your brain is wired to attach to whoever appears to provide safety. In a trauma-bonded relationship, that “safe person” and the source of the threat are the same person. The result is a confusing reality where the one hurting you also feels like the only one who can comfort you.
This is why trauma bonds form even in people who are otherwise discerning, capable, and clear-thinking outside the relationship. The brain is doing what brains do.
The Neuroscience Behind Trauma BondsYour brain runs on a system of rewards and threats. In a trauma-bonded relationship, that system gets hijacked through a process called intermittent reinforcement.
Here is the mechanism. When abuse occurs, your body floods with stress hormones, especially cortisol and adrenaline. Your nervous system enters survival mode. Then, when the abuser shifts to kindness, an apology, a gift, or even just the absence of abuse, your brain releases dopamine. Dopamine is the same chemical involved in pleasure, reward, and relief. Your nervous system reads the drop in cortisol as “the threat passed,” and the dopamine surge feels like love.
During those reconciliation phases, your brain also floods with oxytocin, the same bonding hormone that pairs a mother to her infant. Oxytocin strengthens bonding signals in the brain, which can make the attachment feel unusually hard to loosen. Detaching can feel physically painful, almost like skin being torn.
The unpredictability is the engine. Because you cannot tell when the kindness will arrive, your brain becomes hyper-attuned to any small signal of warmth. The cycle of chronic stress followed by intermittent reward can condition the nervous system much like a slot machine conditions a gambler, and many of the same brain pathways are involved.
This is why willpower alone rarely works. You are not staying because you are weak. You are staying because your nervous system has built a real, biochemical dependency on the relief that follows the harm. We tend to see this most clearly when clients describe feeling “fine” all day, then experiencing intense physical agitation in the evenings when the no-contact gap stretches longer. The body is asking for its dose.
Recognizing the trauma bond as a biochemical pattern rather than a character flaw is the first move that makes breaking it possible. From there, the next thing that helps is being able to see the stages it tends to move through.
The 7 Stages of Trauma BondingTrauma bonds do not form overnight. They develop through a fairly predictable sequence of behaviors that gradually expand the abusive person’s control while eroding the other person’s sense of reality and self-worth. Carnes’ framework is often summarized in seven stages.
Stage 1: Love BombingThe first stage is overwhelming positive attention. Constant texting, expensive gifts, fast declarations of love, intense focus that makes you feel uniquely chosen and seen. The intensity feels like fate or soulmate-level connection.
Love bombing serves a purpose that becomes clear in hindsight. It establishes a “high” that you will later chase when the abuse begins. It also accelerates emotional commitment before you have had time to observe the other person’s character under stress.
Stage 2: Trust and DependencyOnce the emotional attachment is in place, the abusive person begins systematically increasing your dependency on them. This often looks like accelerating commitment (moving in fast, marriage pressure), encouraging financial reliance, gradually isolating you from friends and family, and becoming your primary source of emotional support.
The isolation is rarely framed as isolation. It usually arrives disguised as love: “I just want you all to myself.” “Your friends don’t get us.” “Your family is toxic.” By the time you notice the social shrinkage, the abuser has become your whole world.
Stage 3: Criticism and DevaluationThe shift from adoration to criticism is usually gradual. The person who once praised everything begins finding fault with your appearance, decisions, body, ideas, and worth.
This stage produces something therapists call cognitive dissonance, the very uncomfortable experience of holding two contradictory beliefs at the same time. You remember the love-bombing phase, so you assume the “real” person is the loving one and the critical version is just a bad day, or stress, or your fault.
Because you’ve become dependent on their approval, you work harder to earn back the affection. You internalize the criticism. You begin to doubt your own self-worth and try to fix yourself to fix the relationship.
Stage 4: GaslightingGaslighting is systematic reality distortion. The abuser denies events you remember clearly, minimizes your feelings, and reframes situations until you doubt your own memory, perception, and sanity. Phrases like “That never happened,” “You’re too sensitive,” and “You’re imagining things” become common.
This stage is especially destabilizing because it erodes your ability to trust yourself. Once you cannot trust your own perceptions, you become dependent on the abuser to define what’s real.
Stage 5: ResignationAfter repeated cycles of abuse, criticism, and gaslighting, many people enter a state of learned helplessness. You stop pushing back. You stop expressing needs. You focus entirely on managing the abuser’s mood to avoid the next conflict.
This is not weakness. It is a survival adaptation. When fighting back or leaving feels impossible, the nervous system shifts into submission to minimize danger. It is the same mechanism that any mammal uses when escape is not an option.
Stage 6: Loss of SelfBy this stage, your identity has been almost entirely absorbed into the relationship. You may have lost track of your own preferences, your own goals, what you find funny, what you want for dinner. The person you were before the relationship feels distant or unfamiliar.
Your whole sense of self orbits the abuser’s needs and moods. Leaving feels not just frightening but unimaginable, because you literally do not know who you would be on the other side of it.
Stage 7: Emotional AddictionThe final stage is full emotional addiction to the abuse-relief cycle. You recognize the harm clearly, and you still feel unable to leave. The intermittent reinforcement has produced enough neurological conditioning that separation triggers real withdrawal symptoms: anxiety, depression, body pain, intrusive thoughts, and powerful urges to return.
This is why people in abusive relationships often leave and come back multiple times. The addiction is real. Breaking it requires more than a decision.
Signs You’re in a Trauma BondTrauma bonds can be hard to identify from the inside, partly because the gaslighting stage trains you to doubt the very perceptions that would tip you off. It can help to look at the signs in three groups: what your body is doing, what the relational pattern looks like, and what your thinking has shifted into.
Body signs:
- You feel hypervigilant around them, scanning their face, mood, and tone before you do anything else
- You experience physical stress responses (tight stomach, racing heart, shallow breathing, nausea) when they enter a room, even when nothing is happening
- You sleep poorly and feel exhausted in a way that does not match your workload
- You have headaches, gut issues, or chronic muscle tension without a medical explanation
Relational signs:
- The relationship runs in extreme highs and lows, with very little middle ground
- You find yourself rationalizing or minimizing harmful behavior, especially to other people who notice it
- You have become more isolated from friends, family, hobbies, or work over time
- You walk on eggshells around their moods and find yourself adjusting your behavior to avoid setting them off
Cognitive signs:
- You fixate on their potential (“They could be so good if they just…”) more than the actual pattern
- You believe you are the problem, even in situations where you can see clearly that you are not
- You feel certain you could not handle life without them, even though you handled life before them
- You replay the good moments often and use them to discount the harmful ones
If most of these resonate, you may be in a trauma bond. Naming it is not a failure, and it is not a verdict on you. It is the first piece of accurate information your nervous system has had in a long time.
Healthy Bonding vs. Trauma BondingPeople in abusive relationships often mistake the intensity of the bond for the depth of love. Intensity and love are not the same thing. The table below names the differences across the parts of a relationship most people notice.
| Aspect | Healthy Bonding | Trauma Bonding | | --- | --- | --- | | Foundation | Trust and safety | Fear and unpredictability | | Communication | Open, honest, and respectful | Manipulation, lies, and control | | Boundaries | Respected and encouraged | Violated and punished | | Self-Worth | Enhanced and supported | Diminished and attacked | | Independence | Encouraged and celebrated | Discouraged and punished | | After Conflict | Resolution and growth | Relief followed by anxiety | | Other Relationships | Supported and welcomed | Isolated and criticized |
For a fuller picture of what the left column actually feels like from the inside, our piece on secure attachment in a healthy relationship walks through how it shows up in the body and the day-to-day.
Trauma Bonding vs. CodependencyTrauma bonding and codependency overlap enough that they get used interchangeably, but they are not the same pattern. The simplest way to tell them apart is to look at what’s driving the stuckness.
Trauma bonding is driven by the relationship itself, specifically by the intermittent reinforcement cycle of abuse and relief that produces a neurochemical attachment. The pull is toward the person who hurts you, and it tends to persist even when no caretaking is involved.
Codependency is driven by your role inside a relationship, usually a learned pattern of finding identity and worth by meeting another person’s needs, often at the expense of your own. It is more typical when the other person has an active addiction, mental health condition, or chronic crisis you are managing.
A relationship can involve both at once. Many do. But the distinction matters because the work to address each is different. Trauma bonding work is largely about safety, nervous system regulation, and breaking the addictive cycle. Codependency work is largely about identity, boundaries, and developing a self that can hold its own ground.
If the harm pattern in your relationship is infidelity, sex addiction, or chronic deception rather than overt abuse, our companion piece on trauma bonding in betrayal trauma is the closer read.
How to Break a Trauma BondBreaking a trauma bond is one of the harder things a person can do, and the difficulty is not a sign you are doing it wrong. The path below is the same one we walk with clients, and it tends to work best when it is taken in order rather than skipped around.
1. Get an accurate picture. Start documenting what’s actually happening, in writing, in factual language. Dates, behaviors, your emotional response. The gaslighting stage is designed to make you doubt your own memory, and a written record is the antidote. Many people find that just three or four weeks of journal entries make the pattern impossible to miss.
2. Build a safety plan before you do anything visible. If there is any risk of physical retaliation, secure documents, set aside emergency funds, save the numbers of people you can call, and identify safe places to go. Work with a domestic violence advocate or trauma-informed therapist on this step if at all possible. Do not announce your plan to the abuser.
3. Move toward no contact, or the strictest contact possible. When it is safe and possible, cutting contact is often one of the most effective moves for breaking a trauma bond, because it stops feeding the neurochemical cycle. Block phone numbers, mute social media, route shared logistics (kids, finances) through a third party or written communication only. Be ready for “hoovering,” the manipulation tactic where the abuser sweeps back in with promises, gifts, or a manufactured crisis. The urge to respond will be intense and is not evidence that you should.
4. Expect withdrawal, and plan for it. The first few weeks often feel less like freedom and more like a chemical comedown. Anxiety, depression, intrusive thoughts about the other person, physical agitation, and overwhelming urges to make contact are all standard. We tend to see two predictable failure points in this phase: the 2 a.m. urge to call, and the social media check that escalates over a few days until contact resumes. Naming these in advance and having a plan for each (a friend to text, a script for what to do instead) helps far more than willpower.
5. Rebuild your support system. Reconnect with the people the relationship pushed away, even when it is awkward. Add a support group of people who have walked this. Add a trauma-informed therapist if you don’t already have one. Isolation is what the bond was built in; connection is what it dissolves in.
6. Address the underlying nervous system pattern. Once the immediate exit is stable, deeper work begins on rewiring the nervous system patterns that the bond hijacked. EMDR, somatic therapies, and IFS-informed trauma therapy are all common parts of that work. A nervous-system-based approach to breaking a trauma bond goes deeper on this part.
A note on the “but I love them” feeling that often shows up in this process. Of course you would feel that, the bond was engineered to produce exactly that feeling. The presence of love-feelings is not evidence the relationship is safe, any more than a slot machine’s near-miss is evidence the machine is fair. The feelings can be real and the relationship can still be the thing that’s hurting you. Both can be true at once.
Your Path Forward: Healing and RecoveryIf you’ve recognized yourself in this article, the fact that a trauma bond formed says nothing about your intelligence, your judgment, or your worth. Trauma bonds form because of how the human brain is built. Anyone, in the right combination of vulnerability and tactics, can be caught in one.
The neural patterns the bond built can be changed. Your sense of self can be rebuilt. Healthy relationships are available to you on the other side of this. Many people we work with are surprised that the agitation can begin to drop once no contact is stable, even when the grief lingers longer.
The immediate next steps look like this:
- Name the pattern. Reading this article has started that. Keep learning what trauma bonding actually is so the gaslighting voice in your head has less ground to stand on.
- Tell one safe person. Pick one trusted friend, family member, or professional and break the isolation the abuse built. You do not have to do this in front of an audience.
- Get a safety plan in place. If you are still in the relationship, work with a domestic violence advocate or trauma therapist to build a safe exit. Consider clearing your browser history so the other person doesn’t see this article.
- Get trauma-informed support. A therapist who understands the neurobiology of trauma bonds, and does not treat this as a generic relationship problem, makes a real difference.
You do not have to do this alone. Our trauma-trained therapists at Therapevo work with people who are still in trauma-bonded relationships and people who are trying to stay out. We understand the neuroscience and the pull-back urges that can make leaving feel so hard. Book a free 20-minute consultation to talk about what support could look like for you.
Frequently Asked QuestionsCan trauma bonds be healed while staying in the relationship?Real healing from a trauma bond requires safety, and safety is rare while the relationship that produced it is still active. The same intermittent reinforcement that created the bond will keep reinforcing it. There are situations where leaving immediately isn’t possible, and harm reduction work matters, but the foundational healing usually requires creating real distance.
How long does it take to break a trauma bond?There is no universal timeline. The work depends on how long and how severe the relationship was, your access to support, your therapy resources, and any earlier trauma history that the bond grew on top of. We tend to see the most intense withdrawal in the first two to six weeks of no contact, with meaningful identity reconstruction happening over the months that follow.
What are the 7 stages of trauma bonding?The seven stages, drawn from Patrick Carnes’ work, are: love bombing, trust and dependency, criticism and devaluation, gaslighting, resignation, loss of self, and emotional addiction. Relationships do not always move through them in clean order, and not every relationship hits every stage, but the sequence captures how the bond typically deepens.
How do you know if you’re in a trauma bond?The clearest signals are: extreme highs and lows with very little middle ground, hypervigilance around the other person’s mood, finding yourself defending or minimizing harmful behavior to people who notice it, progressive isolation from your other relationships, and the feeling that you could not function without the person even when they are the source of most of your distress. If several of those fit, it’s worth talking to a trauma-informed therapist.
What’s the difference between trauma bonding and Stockholm syndrome?Stockholm syndrome is a specific form of traumatic bonding originally described in captivity situations, such as kidnappings. Trauma bonding is the broader pattern, and it applies anywhere the abuse-affection cycle creates an unhealthy attachment, including romantic relationships, parent-child relationships, workplaces, and high-control religious or community groups. All Stockholm syndrome involves a trauma bond. Most trauma bonds are not Stockholm syndrome.
Is it normal to miss your abuser after leaving?Yes, and intensely. Missing the other person is part of the withdrawal process from a real biochemical attachment. It does not mean you made the wrong choice or that the relationship was actually good. It means your nervous system is recalibrating after losing a substance it became dependent on. The missing tends to drop sharply once no contact has held for several weeks, even when the grief takes longer.
Therapevo Counselling Inc. specializes in trauma therapy and walking with people who are trapped in, or recovering from, abusive relationships. If you are ready to understand what is happening to you and start the work of getting free, we are here to help.
You haven’t been the same since you found out. You read the texts, or sat through the disclosure, or saw the screen, and something inside you broke that you can’t quite name. People keep telling you to “process it” or “give it time,” and you nod, because what else are you supposed to do. But sleep won’t come. Food has no taste. You replay the same sixty seconds of conversation a hundred times a day, and your body shakes for reasons you can’t explain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5ssPRmnkbMWhat you’re experiencing is not weakness. It is not overreaction. The effects of betrayal on the brain are real, measurable, and well-documented, and what’s happening to you is closer to a neurological injury than a bad mood. Understanding that distinction changes everything about what comes next.
This article walks through what betrayal trauma actually does to your brain and body, what the symptoms look like, and what genuine recovery requires. We’ve spent years sitting with people in the early weeks after discovery, and the single most stabilizing thing we can offer is this: there is a reason for what you’re feeling, and there is a path through it.
What Is Betrayal Trauma?Betrayal trauma was first described by psychologist Dr. Jennifer Freyd in the 1990s. Her research drew a line between general trauma and a specific category: trauma caused by the very person you depended on for safety, attachment, or survival. A car accident is traumatic. A natural disaster is traumatic. But when the source of the harm is the person you trusted to have your back, your brain does something different with it.
Freyd’s term for this category is significant. She didn’t call it “infidelity stress” or “relationship distress.” She called it trauma, because the brain processes it as one. The attachment system, which is the part of you wired from infancy to seek closeness with safe others, gets hit at the same time as the threat-detection system. The two are usually opposites. Now they are pointed at the same person.
This is why betrayal trauma is so disorienting. Ordinary trauma teaches you to avoid the source. Betrayal trauma asks you to stay in proximity to it, often in the same house, often in the same bed, while every alarm bell in your nervous system is ringing.
The Effects of Betrayal on the Brain: What the Neuroscience ShowsWhen your brain registers a betrayal, the threat-response system fires before your conscious mind has caught up. Three regions take the heaviest load.
The Amygdala Goes Into OverdriveThe amygdala is your brain’s alarm system. After betrayal, it stays switched on. Sometimes for months. A song on the radio, the sight of a phone screen, the wrong cologne in a hallway: any of it can drop you into full-body panic with no warning. Your amygdala has spent the last few weeks tagging ordinary stimuli as dangerous, and now it can’t tell the difference between a memory and a threat.
The Prefrontal Cortex Goes OfflineThe prefrontal cortex is the part of you that reasons, plans, and regulates emotion. Under sustained threat, blood and oxygen get pulled away from it and routed to survival systems. So you can’t think straight. You can’t decide what to make for dinner. You forget what you walked into the kitchen for. Friends say “you don’t seem like yourself,” and they’re right. The part of your brain that runs “yourself” is operating on reduced power.
The Hippocampus Can’t File the MemoryThe hippocampus is what stamps an experience with a time and place so your brain can store it as past. Trauma overwhelms it. The memory gets stored without the “this happened then” tag, which is why intrusive thoughts feel like they’re happening now, every time. Your brain isn’t being dramatic. It hasn’t finished the filing.
All of this drives a hormonal cascade. Cortisol and adrenaline stay elevated. The vagus nerve, which connects your brain to your gut, heart, and lungs, registers chronic threat and shifts your body into a sustained sympathetic state. That’s the bridge between brain effects and body symptoms, and it’s why betrayal trauma is never just emotional.
Betrayal Trauma Symptoms: What You’re Actually FeelingBetrayal trauma symptoms cluster into four groups: cognitive, emotional, physical, and behavioral. Most people experience some from each category. Reading them in one place often produces the response we hear most often in session: “I thought I was the only one.”
Cognitive SymptomsIntrusive thoughts and images that arrive uninvited. Mental replay of the discovery moment. Difficulty concentrating. Forgetfulness. Trouble making small decisions. Hypervigilance, which often shows up as compulsively checking phones, receipts, or location apps. Many people describe a kind of mental static that makes reading or following a conversation almost impossible.
Emotional SymptomsWaves of grief, rage, terror, numbness, and sometimes all four in the same hour. A flatness that feels like depression but functions differently. A loss of trust that extends past the partner to the world itself. Shame, often misplaced, often crushing. Many betrayed partners report a particular form of loneliness: the people who would normally comfort them are the people who can’t be told.
Physical SymptomsSleep disruption, particularly waking at 3 or 4 a.m. with a racing mind. Appetite changes, both directions. Chest tightness. Stomach problems. Muscle tension that lodges in the jaw, shoulders, or low back. Headaches. Recurring colds and infections as the immune system takes the hit of sustained cortisol. Some people lose meaningful weight in the first month without trying.
Behavioral SymptomsAvoidance of places, songs, or routines. Compulsive information seeking. Withdrawing from friends. Snapping at children. Difficulty being present at work. A sudden inability to tolerate ambiguity, even small ambiguity, because the betrayal taught your nervous system that ambiguity hides danger.
If you recognize yourself in this list, what you have is a coherent neurobiological response to a real injury. You are not unstable. You are reacting to something your brain wasn’t designed to absorb.
Why Some People Don’t See the Betrayal ComingJennifer Freyd’s research also produced a concept called betrayal blindness. When the person harming you is also the person you depend on for survival, attachment, or financial stability, your brain can suppress the awareness of harm in order to preserve the relationship. This is not denial in the conscious sense. It is a protective mechanism that keeps the attachment intact when leaving feels impossible.
Betrayal blindness is why so many people, looking back, can name a dozen small moments where something felt off. The phone turned face down. The unexplained late nights. The defensiveness when you asked an ordinary question. The brain registered all of it. The brain also filed it where you couldn’t quite reach it, because reaching it would have meant losing the relationship before you were ready to lose it.
If you’re now blaming yourself for not seeing what was happening, please take this in: betrayal blindness is a feature of how attachment works, not a flaw in how you do. The same wiring that helps an infant trust a caregiver who isn’t always reliable is the wiring that kept you from seeing what your conscious mind couldn’t yet hold.
What We See in PracticeIn our CSAT-trained work at Therapevo, one pattern shows up almost universally in the first six weeks: clients apologize for their reactions. They apologize for crying. They apologize for asking the same question three times. They apologize for not being able to remember whether they ate lunch. The shame around the response often eclipses the shame around what was done to them.
Part of what stabilizes the early weeks is simply naming what’s happening. When someone hears that the brain fog and the 3 a.m. waking and the shaking hands are a documented, expected response to a survival-level threat, something settles. Not all the way. But enough to start.
The other thing we see consistently: the people who recover most fully are not the ones who push through fastest. They’re the ones who let the response be what it is, get appropriate support, and resist the cultural pressure to “be okay” before their nervous system has caught up.
How Betrayal Trauma Shows Up in the BodyBecause the vagus nerve runs from the brainstem through the chest and abdomen, sustained nervous-system activation produces real physical pathology. Common physical effects include:
Sleep architecture disruption. Even when you do sleep, the deep stages where the body repairs itself are shortened. You can sleep eight hours and still feel exhausted.
Digestive distress. The gut has its own dense network of nerves, and chronic threat activation reliably produces nausea, appetite swings, IBS-like symptoms, and food intolerances that weren’t there before.
Cardiovascular strain. Elevated resting heart rate, blood pressure changes, and chest tightness are common. Most are reversible once the nervous system stabilizes, but they’re real while they’re happening.
Immune suppression. Sustained cortisol blunts immune function. Many betrayed partners catch every bug going around in the first few months.
Hormonal disruption. Menstrual cycle changes, libido shifts, and thyroid function changes have all been documented in trauma research.
None of these are imagined. None of them mean something is medically wrong with you in a permanent sense. They mean your body is doing exactly what it does under sustained threat, and they typically begin to resolve once safety is reestablished and trauma-informed support is in place.
Betrayal Trauma Recovery: What Healing Actually Looks LikeRecovery from betrayal trauma is not a straight line, and it is not a checklist. But it does follow a recognizable arc. Most clinicians who work in this area describe three broad phases.
Phase One: StabilizationThe first phase is not about processing the betrayal. It is about getting your nervous system out of crisis. This means basic regulation: sleep, food, hydration, and predictable routines. It means information, because uncertainty keeps the threat system activated. It often means a structured therapeutic disclosure, where the betrayed partner gets a complete and verifiable account of what actually happened, so the brain stops scanning for new revelations.
Stabilization is also where appropriate support enters: a trauma-trained therapist for the betrayed partner, a separate clinician for the partner who acted out, and often a structured peer group. People who try to skip stabilization and move straight to “working on the marriage” almost always regress.
Phase Two: Trauma ProcessingOnce the nervous system is regulated enough to tolerate it, the work shifts to processing the trauma itself. Modalities like EMDR, somatic experiencing, and trauma-focused cognitive therapy help the brain finally file the experience as past rather than present. This is the phase where intrusive thoughts begin to subside, where the body releases held tension, and where you start to remember who you were before the betrayal without that memory triggering grief.
Phase two often includes grief work that goes beyond the betrayal itself. People grieve the marriage they thought they had, the future they had pictured, the version of their partner that turned out to be partially constructed.
Phase Three: RestorationThe final phase is about rebuilding a life. For some couples, this is the phase where serious relationship repair becomes possible, anchored in real changes from the partner who acted out. For other people, it’s the phase where they rebuild their life apart. Both are legitimate outcomes. The point of recovery is not to save the marriage at all costs. The point is to get the betrayed partner free of the trauma response and back into their own life, whatever shape that life takes.
Across all three phases, two things consistently predict good outcomes: trauma-informed professional support, and the betrayed partner having space to feel what they actually feel without being managed or rushed.
Can the Brain Heal from Betrayal Trauma?Yes. The brain has a property called neuroplasticity, which is its capacity to form new neural pathways throughout life. The same brain that learned to scan every interaction for threat can learn to settle again. The amygdala can quiet. The prefrontal cortex can come back online. The hippocampus can finally file the memory as past.
This doesn’t happen on its own and it doesn’t happen on a fixed timeline, but it does happen. We’ve watched it happen hundreds of times. The brain is not damaged. It is responding exactly as it was designed to respond to a particular kind of injury, and like other injuries, it heals when given the right conditions.
If you’re in the early weeks and reading this through brain fog and exhaustion, the timeline doesn’t matter right now. What matters is that the response you’re having is not who you are. It’s what you’re going through.
When to Get SupportIf any of the following are true for you, working with a therapist trained in betrayal trauma is the most useful next step:
You’re more than two weeks past discovery and your sleep, appetite, or daily functioning hasn’t begun to stabilize. You’re having intrusive thoughts that interrupt your ability to work or care for your kids. You’re in the same household as the partner who betrayed you and the proximity is keeping your nervous system in constant alarm. You’re isolated from the people who would normally support you. You’re starting to question your own perception of reality, especially if your partner is minimizing or denying what happened.
If trust has been broken and you’re not sure what to do next, our page on when you can’t trust your spouse walks through what’s normal in the early weeks. If you’re feeling pulled back into the relationship in confusing ways even after the betrayal, trauma bonding in betrayal trauma may be part of what’s happening. Our work with betrayed partners is described on the healing for the betrayed page, and a free consultation is a reasonable place to start if you’re not sure where to begin.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat does betrayal trauma do to the brain?It puts your brain into a sustained survival response. The amygdala stays on high alert and starts treating ordinary cues as threats, which is why a song or a phone notification can trigger panic. The prefrontal cortex, which handles reasoning and emotional regulation, runs on reduced power, which is why decision-making and concentration suffer. The hippocampus loses its ability to time-stamp the experience as past, which is why memories of the betrayal feel like they’re happening in real time. These are documented neurobiological changes, not character flaws.
Can the brain heal from betrayal trauma?Yes. The brain is neuroplastic, meaning it forms new neural pathways throughout life. With the right support, the alarm settles, the reasoning systems come back online, and the brain finally files the memory as past. Healing is rarely linear. It usually takes between six and eighteen months of consistent work with a trauma-trained therapist, often using approaches like EMDR, somatic therapy, or trauma-focused cognitive therapy.
What are the physical symptoms of betrayal trauma?The most common physical symptoms are disrupted sleep, appetite changes, a tight chest, gut problems, jaw and shoulder tension, headaches, and a noticeable drop in immune function. Many betrayed partners also report changes in their menstrual cycle or libido. These show up because the sympathetic nervous system is stuck in a high-output state, and the body wasn’t designed to run on emergency settings indefinitely. Most physical symptoms ease as the nervous system stabilizes.
How long does betrayal trauma last?There’s no fixed timeline, but most people move through recognizable phases. The acute crisis usually lasts six to twelve weeks, when sleep and functioning are most affected. Active trauma processing typically takes six to eighteen months. People often feel meaningful relief well before the work is “done,” especially once they understand what’s actually happening in their brain and body and have professional support in place.
Is betrayal trauma the same as PTSD?It’s closely related. Betrayal trauma produces symptoms that overlap heavily with PTSD, including hypervigilance, flashbacks, avoidance, and emotional dysregulation. Some clinicians use the term post-infidelity stress disorder for this presentation. The key difference is that an attachment figure caused the harm, which makes recovery more complicated because your nervous system has to navigate threat and attachment toward the same person at the same time.
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Childhood trauma and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) frequently manifest in adult life through patterns so subtle that many people never connect them to their early years. These hidden signs operate beneath conscious awareness, shaping relationships, health, and self-perception in ways that feel entirely normal to those experiencing them—until they recognize the pattern.
The prevalence of child childhood trauma is staggering, with millions of children worldwide experiencing adverse events each year. Many children who experience trauma suffer in silence, unable to articulate their pain or seek help from caregivers who may be unaware of the abuse or neglect occurring within the home.
This article covers the 12 most overlooked signs that adults who experienced childhood trauma may not recognize as trauma-related. The information serves adults experiencing unexplained life patterns, mental health professionals seeking to identify complex trauma presentations, and family members supporting trauma survivors through their healing journey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY7X4505Eow
The 12 hidden signs include: chronic emptiness, difficulty with emotional intimacy, hypervigilance in relationships, over-responsibility for others’ emotions, persistent imposter syndrome, inability to identify personal needs, normalized self-criticism, feeling fundamentally flawed, unexplained chronic health issues, extreme sensitivity to criticism, compulsive busyness, and constant alertness or startling easily.
By the end of this article, you will:
- Recognize hidden trauma patterns that may have gone unnoticed for years
- Understand how childhood adversity creates lasting but treatable effects
- Know when and how to seek appropriate mental health services administration support
- Gain clarity on the connection between early childhood experiences and current struggles
Understanding Childhood Trauma and ACEsAdverse childhood experiences represent traumatic events occurring before age 18 that disrupt a child’s sense of safety and healthy development. These include physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect, witnessing violence, domestic violence, substance abuse in the household, mental illness in caregivers, parental separation, and having family members who are incarcerated.
Childhood trauma becomes “hidden” through the brain’s protective coping mechanisms. When overwhelming experiences occur at a young age, the developing mind employs strategies like dissociation, repression, and normalization to survive. These same protective responses later prevent adults from connecting current difficulties to past events, creating a disconnect between present symptoms and their original trauma.
The cumulative effects of trauma can undermine a child’s sense of self-worth, identity, and resilience. This can have a profound and lasting impact on a person’s life, affecting their overall well-being, mental health, and ability to form healthy relationships.
The ACE study, surveying over 17,000 adults, established that negative childhood experiences create measurable, dose-dependent effects on adult functioning. Each additional adverse experience compounds risk for mental health problems, physical health problems, and relationship difficulties—a pattern called biological embedding where early adversity literally alters brain development and stress response systems.
How Trauma Hides in Plain SightPsychological mechanisms protect trauma survivors from overwhelming emotional pain, but these same mechanisms obscure the connection between childhood adversity and adult struggles. Repressed childhood trauma operates through the brain’s capacity to wall off threatening material from conscious access, while dissociative amnesia creates gaps in memory around traumatic experiences. Dissociative episodes can significantly impact an individual’s sense of self and reality, making it difficult to connect present-day feelings and behaviors to past trauma.
Brain development during traumatic experiences creates lasting but subtle patterns in neural circuitry. The prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus develop differently under conditions of chronic stress, creating heightened threat sensitivity and emotional dysregulation that feel like personality traits rather than trauma responses. Adults often describe these patterns as “just how I am” rather than recognizing them as adaptations to childhood adversity.
The ACEs Study FoundationThe landmark ACE research revealed that at least one ACE affects approximately 61% of adults, while multiple ACEs create compounding health risks. Higher ACE scores correlate directly with increased rates of heart disease, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, substance abuse, mental health conditions, and reduced life expectancy.
This dose-response relationship means that childhood trauma in adults manifests proportionally to the severity and accumulation of early experiences. The research validates what trauma survivors often sense intuitively—that their struggles have roots extending far beyond current circumstances into the formative experiences that shaped their nervous systems.
Types of Childhood TraumaIf you’re reading this, you may be wondering how experiences from your childhood continue to shape your life today. Childhood trauma encompasses a wide spectrum of adverse experiences that can profoundly impact your developing sense of self, your emotional world, and the way you navigate relationships. Understanding these experiences—including physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, and witnessing violence—is the first step on your healing journey. While these traumatic events may have occurred when you were young, please know that their lasting impact doesn’t define your future. With the right support and understanding, you can heal, build healthy relationships, and reclaim your peace of mind.
Physical abuse involves intentional harm like hitting, kicking, or burning—experiences that may have taught you to associate relationships with fear and unpredictability. If this resonates with your story, you’re not alone in carrying both physical and emotional scars. The pain you experienced was real, and so is your capacity to heal from it. Emotional abuse includes name-calling, constant criticism, belittling, or rejection—words and actions that may have eroded your sense of self-worth over time. Perhaps you still hear those critical voices, but with compassionate support, you can learn to quiet them and develop the loving inner voice you deserve. Sexual abuse represents one of the most devastating forms of trauma, potentially leaving you struggling with repressed memories, deep emotional pain, and challenges with trust and intimacy. Your survival shows incredible strength, and healing from these experiences, while challenging, is absolutely possible with specialized care.
Neglect—whether your basic needs for food, shelter, medical care, or emotional support weren’t met—can be just as damaging as more obvious forms of abuse. If you’ve carried feelings of emptiness, difficulty understanding your own needs, or a persistent sense that something is fundamentally wrong with you, these feelings make complete sense given what you experienced. You deserved care and attention then, and you deserve healing and support now. Witnessing violence, such as domestic violence or community violence, may have shattered your sense of safety and stability in the world. If you find yourself constantly on guard or struggling with anxiety, depression, or symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), these are natural responses to unnatural circumstances you shouldn’t have had to endure.
Your adverse childhood experiences, recognized by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) as critical risk factors, may have increased your vulnerability to mental health challenges, substance use struggles, and physical health problems—including chronic pain, autoimmune disorders, and cardiovascular disease. The more adverse experiences you faced, the greater your risk for complex trauma and long-term health consequences. But here’s what’s equally important to understand: recognizing these connections empowers you to take meaningful steps toward healing and breaking these cycles.
Your childhood experiences may have disrupted your ability to form secure, trusting relationships, perhaps leaving you with patterns of anxious or avoidant attachment that make intimacy feel overwhelming or impossible. If you find yourself struggling with trust, emotional connection, or believing you’re worthy of love, these challenges stem from what happened to you, not who you are as a person. The beautiful truth is that with the right therapeutic support, you can develop new, healthier patterns of relating to others and to yourself. Evidence-based therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and cognitive processing therapy (CPT) provide safe, supportive environments where you can process your experiences, develop healthy coping strategies, and begin reclaiming your life.
Beyond therapy, you can nurture your healing through self-care practices that honor your journey—creative expression that gives voice to your experiences, mindfulness that helps you stay grounded in the present moment, and regular movement that helps your body process and release stored trauma. These aren’t just nice additions to your healing toolkit; they’re powerful ways to regulate your emotions and transform your relationship with the lingering effects of your past. Remember, healing isn’t about forgetting what happened—it’s about reducing its power over your present and future.
Understanding childhood trauma in all its forms—physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, and witnessing violence—helps you make sense of your adult experiences and gives you a roadmap for healing. If you recognize yourself in these descriptions, please know that your pain is valid, your survival is remarkable, and your healing is possible. With compassionate therapeutic support and the right resources, you can build the healthy relationships you deserve, develop a loving relationship with yourself, and significantly reduce the impact of trauma on your mental and physical wellbeing. Your story doesn’t end with what happened to you—it continues with how you choose to heal and grow from here.
The Subtle Nature of Hidden Trauma SignsHidden trauma signs differ fundamentally from obvious symptoms like flashbacks or nightmares. These subtle manifestations integrate so thoroughly into daily functioning that they appear to be personality characteristics, relationship preferences, or simply “the way life works” rather than trauma responses requiring attention.
Adults who experienced adverse childhood experiences often normalize patterns that others would recognize as dysfunctional. When chronic pain, relationship difficulties, or self-criticism have been present since childhood, they establish a baseline that feels unremarkable. The person’s life becomes organized around these patterns without conscious recognition of their traumatic origins. Childhood trauma can influence a person’s behavior in ways that persist into adulthood, even if the trauma is not consciously remembered.
Why These Signs Go UnrecognizedCultural factors mask trauma effects through messages that minimize childhood experiences or promote “getting over” the past. Social pressure to appear functional leads many trauma survivors to develop sophisticated compensation strategies that hide internal struggles even from themselves. High-achieving adults frequently present as successful while experiencing profound internal distress—a phenomenon that delays seeking support.
Successful professional and social functioning can coexist with significant hidden trauma signs. Adults may excel in structured environments while struggling intensely in intimate relationships, or maintain productive careers while experiencing chronic pain and unexplained physical symptoms. This functional presentation often prevents both the individual and their healthcare providers from recognizing unresolved trauma as the underlying issue.
The Cost of Unrecognized TraumaUntreated complex trauma exerts continuous pressure on every domain of a person’s behavior and functioning. Intimate relationships suffer from insecure attachment styles developed in childhood, while professional relationships may be marked by hypervigilance or difficulty accepting appropriate recognition. The emotional support that could facilitate healing often feels threatening or impossible to accept.
Physical health consequences of unrecognized trauma include elevated rates of chronic pain, autoimmune disorders, cardiovascular disease, and frequent illness. Mental health problems including anxiety, depression, and substance abuse often represent attempts to manage symptoms of underlying trauma rather than primary conditions. The healing process cannot begin until these connections become visible.
The 12 Hidden Signs of Childhood Trauma ACEsThese signs organize into three categories reflecting how childhood trauma manifests across emotional, cognitive, and physical domains. Recognizing that multiple signs often occur together helps adults identify patterns that might otherwise seem unrelated.
Emotional and Relationship PatternsSign 1: Chronic Feelings of Emptiness or Disconnection
Adults who experience trauma in early childhood often describe a persistent sense of hollowness or emotional numbness that doesn’t respond to positive life circumstances. Achievements, relationships, and pleasurable activities may provide temporary relief but fail to fill an underlying void. This emptiness reflects developmental interruption—the child’s emotional needs went unmet during critical periods, creating a lasting sense that something fundamental is missing. Unlike situational sadness, this chronic disconnection persists regardless of external circumstances.
Sign 2: Difficulty with Emotional Intimacy Despite Craving Connection
Many trauma survivors experience intense longing for connection alongside profound difficulty allowing closeness. They may initiate relationships enthusiastically, then withdraw when intimacy deepens—or select partners who cannot provide genuine closeness. This pattern reflects attachment relationships formed in childhood, where connection may have been paired with pain, unpredictability, or betrayal. The nervous system learned that vulnerability leads to harm, creating automatic protective responses that override conscious desires for healthy relationships.
Sign 3: Hypervigilance in Relationships (Reading Others’ Moods Constantly)
Adults with childhood trauma often become experts at monitoring others’ emotional states, scanning faces for signs of disapproval, anger, or withdrawal. This heightened sensitivity developed as a survival strategy in unpredictable environments where detecting caregivers’ moods provided crucial safety information. In adult life, this hypervigilance manifests as exhausting attention to others’ reactions, difficulty relaxing in social situations, and an individual’s sense of being responsible for managing everyone’s emotional state.
Sign 4: Assuming Responsibility for Others’ Emotions and Reactions
Taking excessive responsibility for how others feel represents a coping mechanism developed in childhood when managing caregivers’ emotions may have been essential for safety. Adults with this pattern apologize excessively, modify their behavior to prevent others’ discomfort, and feel guilty when others experience negative emotions—even when logically uninvolved. This over-responsibility creates relationship dynamics where the individual’s needs consistently rank below others’.
Self-Perception and Identity IssuesSign 5: Persistent Imposter Syndrome Regardless of Achievements
Chronic feelings of fraudulence despite objective success characterize many adults who experienced childhood trauma. Regardless of accomplishments, they anticipate exposure as fundamentally incompetent or undeserving. This pattern reflects early experiences where their worth was questioned, achievements minimized, or capabilities criticized. The low self esteem established in childhood persists into adulthood, reinterpreting every success as accidental while confirming every difficulty as evidence of inherent inadequacy.
Sign 6: Difficulty Identifying Personal Needs, Wants, and Boundaries
Many trauma survivors reach adulthood without basic self-knowledge about their preferences, needs, and limits. When asked what they want, they may genuinely not know. This difficulty stems from childhood environments where expressing needs was dangerous, ignored, or actively punished. The child learned to suppress self-awareness as a protective strategy, creating adults who can identify others’ needs precisely while remaining disconnected from their own inner child and authentic desires.
Sign 7: Chronic Self-Criticism That Feels “Normal” or Motivating
Internal dialogue marked by harsh, punishing criticism often goes unrecognized because it feels like a normal—even productive—part of self-management. Adults may believe their inner critic keeps them performing well, unaware that this voice represents internalized messages from traumatic experiences. The intensity of self-criticism typically far exceeds what circumstances warrant, treating minor mistakes as evidence of fundamental worthlessness.
Sign 8: Feeling Fundamentally Different or Flawed Compared to Others
A pervasive sense of being essentially unlike others—broken, bad, or defective at the core—reflects the deep shame that childhood trauma instills. This differs from contextual self-doubt; it represents an identity-level conviction that something is constitutionally wrong with the individual. Traumatic events, particularly those involving physical harm, sexual abuse, or emotional abuse, create intense emotional pain that children often interpret as evidence of their own defectiveness rather than recognizing the failure of adult protectors.
4.3 Physical and Behavioral Manifestations and Coping StrategiesSign 9: Unexplained Chronic Health Issues or Frequent Illness
Physical symptoms without clear medical explanation frequently accompany unresolved trauma. These include chronic pain, digestive problems, headaches, autoimmune disorders, and susceptibility to illness. Research from the ACE study demonstrates direct connections between childhood adversity and adult health conditions including heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. The body literally keeps the score—traumatic memories encode in the nervous system, creating lasting physical manifestations that medical care focused solely on symptoms cannot resolve. Childhood trauma has also been linked to impairments in academic achievement, employment opportunities, and overall quality of life.
Sign 10: Extreme Sensitivity to Criticism or Conflict
Reactions to criticism or conflict that seem disproportionate often reflect trauma-altered threat detection systems. Minor disagreements may trigger intense emotional responses—defensive rage, dissociation, or total shutdown. This sensitivity developed when criticism from caregivers carried genuine threat of physical abuse, emotional abuse, or abandonment. The adult nervous system continues responding to perceived criticism as if survival were at stake, even in objectively safe contexts.
Sign 11: Compulsive Busyness or Inability to Rest Without Guilt
Many trauma survivors develop patterns of constant activity, finding stillness intolerable. This compulsive busyness serves as a coping strategy to avoid traumatic memories and the emotions that emerge during quiet moments. Rest may trigger guilt, anxiety, or intrusive thoughts, making productivity feel necessary for emotional regulation. The individual may recognize exhaustion while feeling genuinely unable to stop, caught in a cycle where slowing down feels more threatening than burnout. Unhealthy coping mechanisms, such as self-harm, may also develop as a way to manage emotional dysregulation or to numb psychological pain.
Sign 12: Startling Easily or Feeling Constantly “On Edge”
Hypervigilance manifests physically as an easily triggered startle response and chronic nervous system activation. Adults may jump at unexpected sounds, feel unable to fully relax, or experience persistent muscle tension. This state developed as protection in environments where danger could emerge suddenly—community violence, domestic violence, or unpredictable caregivers. The nervous system learned to maintain constant alertness, a protective adaptation that becomes exhausting when the original trauma has passed but the body hasn’t received the message that safety has arrived.
Common Challenges in Recognition and SolutionsRecognizing hidden trauma signs requires overcoming psychological barriers that developed precisely to keep traumatic experiences out of awareness. Understanding these challenges helps adults and their supportive relationships navigate the recognition process.
Denial and MinimizationAdults frequently dismiss their experiences as “not that bad” or compare themselves to those with more obvious trauma. This minimization represents a coping mechanism rather than accurate assessment. Strategies for overcoming this pattern include journaling about experiences without judgment, working with a qualified professional who can provide external perspective, and reading about others’ experiences to calibrate what constitutes traumatic events versus normal childhood challenges.
Fear of Confronting the PastMany adults avoid recognizing trauma signs because they fear what acknowledgment might require—reopening traumatic memories, experiencing intense emotional pain, or disrupting current functioning. However, the healing journey does not require perfect recall or detailed confrontation with every past event. Modern trauma-informed approaches including cognitive processing therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy focus on present-day symptoms and coping strategies rather than extensive re-experiencing of traumatic experiences.
5.3 Lack of Memory or “Proof” in Repressed Childhood TraumaDissociative amnesia and repressed memories mean many trauma survivors cannot clearly recall what happened to them. Missing memory does not invalidate current symptoms or indicate that trauma didn’t occur. Mental health professionals trained in complex trauma understand that present-day patterns—the 12 signs described above—constitute valid evidence of childhood adversity regardless of explicit recall. Treatment focuses on the person’s current functioning rather than establishing historical proof.
Conclusion and Next StepsHidden trauma signs represent valid, treatable responses to adverse childhood experiences. Recognition marks the beginning of a healing process that can fundamentally improve adult life—relationships become more fulfilling, physical symptoms may decrease, and the chronic sense of being flawed or different can resolve into understanding and self-compassion.
Immediate steps for adults recognizing these signs:
- Complete an ACE assessment to understand your childhood adversity exposure
- Seek consultation with a mental health professional trained in trauma-informed care
- Begin establishing self care practices that support nervous system regulation
- Consider therapeutic interventions specifically designed for trauma, including EMDR or somatic therapy
- Build supportive relationships and community connections that provide secure attachment experiences
Related topics worth exploring include specific trauma therapies, building resilience and protective factors, supporting loved ones through their healing journey, and preventing adverse childhood experiences in the next generation through creating safe and supportive environments for children.
Additional ResourcesAssessment Tools:
- ACE questionnaire for understanding childhood adversity exposure
- Trauma symptom inventories for identifying current impacts
- Attachment style assessments for understanding relationship patterns
Therapeutic Approaches:
- EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) for processing traumatic memories
- Somatic experiencing for addressing body-based trauma responses
- Internal Family Systems for healing the inner child and fragmented self-states
Support Networks:
- Support groups for trauma survivors
- Online communities providing peer emotional support
- Organizations specializing in complex trauma recovery
- Resources for family members seeking to understand and support loved ones
IntroductionUnderstanding and calming hypervigilance through grounding techniques for feeling safe involves learning specific strategies that help regulate your nervous system while maintaining necessary environmental awareness. This guide immediately addresses the importance of grounding techniques for feeling safe, ensuring you have practical tools to manage heightened states of alertness. When you’re stuck in a state of constant alertness, traditional relaxation methods often feel impossible or even dangerous, making specialized grounding approaches essential for finding relief.
The basics of grounding techniques involve simple, basic mental exercises that help manage anxiety, reduce negative thoughts, and refocus the mind.
This guide provides concrete techniques that work specifically for hypervigilant states—those moments when your brain refuses to stop scanning for threats, even in safe environments. At the first mention, hypervigilance (a state of increased alertness where the brain is constantly looking for perceived dangers) is a key concept for understanding why these techniques are necessary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUBxGhT5fP0
What This Guide Covers
You’ll learn evidence-based grounding strategies designed for people whose nervous system stays in high alert mode, practical breathing techniques that calm without creating vulnerability, and daily routines that signal safety to an overactive nervous system that is working hard to detect threats. Specifically, you will discover:
- How hypervigilance differs from normal alertness and why it persists
- Nervous system regulation through awareness-maintaining grounding techniques
- The 5-4-3-2-1 technique adapted for safety-conscious individuals
- Box breathing methods for calming without vulnerability
- Building predictable routines that signal safety to your brain
Who This Is For
This guide is designed for individuals experiencing hypervigilance from trauma, anxiety disorders, PTSD, or chronic stress who need concrete techniques to feel safe in their environment. Whether you’re dealing with constant jumpiness from past trauma or anxiety that keeps you perpetually on edge, you’ll find practical strategies that honor your need for awareness while providing nervous system relief. Fear and feeling anxious are common experiences for people with hypervigilance, and grounding techniques can help manage these emotions and negative thoughts.
Why This Matters
Hypervigilance keeps your nervous system in constant activation, disrupting sleep, relationships, and daily functioning while creating exhaustion that never seems to resolve. Common symptoms of anxiety include increased heart rate, sweating, and difficulty focusing, and occasionally people experiencing hypervigilance may even develop recurring panic attacks during everyday activities. Grounding techniques offer relief by working with your nervous system’s natural regulation processes rather than against your survival instincts.
If you experience persistent hypervigilance or anxiety, consider seeking professional help. Grounding techniques are not a substitute for professional mental health treatment.
Next, we’ll explore what hypervigilance is, how it impacts your daily life, and why understanding your nervous system’s role is crucial for effective grounding.
Understanding Hypervigilance and Its ImpactHypervigilance is a state of increased alertness where the brain is constantly looking for perceived dangers. This survival mechanism involves your brain’s threat-detection system working overtime, interpreting neutral situations as potentially dangerous and maintaining readiness to respond to perceived threats at any moment. Fear and negative thoughts often drive the brain’s threat-detection system into overdrive, making it difficult to distinguish between real and imagined threats.
Unlike normal alertness that you can turn on and off as needed, hypervigilance represents an inability to “power down” your threat detection system. People with hypervigilance tend to develop certain symptoms or behaviors, such as being unable to relax or disconnect from their environment. Your brain stays activated even during activities that should feel relaxing, leading to exhaustion that rest doesn’t seem to fix.
The Nervous System in HypervigilanceYour sympathetic nervous system—responsible for fight-or-flight responses—remains chronically activated during hypervigilant states. This means your body produces stress hormones continuously, keeping your heart rate elevated, muscles tense, and mind racing with anxious thoughts about potential dangers.
Physical sensations during hypervigilance include jumpiness at unexpected sounds, difficulty concentrating on tasks, muscle tension that won’t release, and feeling overwhelmed by normal environmental stimuli. People in hypervigilant states tend to experience common symptoms of anxiety such as increased heart rate, sweating, and difficulty focusing. Your body maintains this state because your nervous system believes you’re still in danger, even when logic tells you otherwise.
Why Traditional Relaxation Techniques May Fall ShortStandard advice to “just relax” or “take deep breaths” often fails when you feel constantly unsafe because your threat detection system interprets relaxation as letting your guard down. When feeling anxious, people tend to avoid relaxation techniques that make them feel vulnerable or less aware of their surroundings. Techniques that involve closing your eyes or becoming less aware of your surroundings can actually increase anxiety and make you feel more vulnerable.
This explains why you might find meditation difficult or feel more anxious when trying conventional stress management approaches—your nervous system prioritizes survival over calm. Understanding this helps explain why specialized grounding techniques that maintain environmental awareness while providing nervous system relief work better for hypervigilant states.
With this understanding of hypervigilance and your nervous system, let’s look at how grounding can offer immediate and long-term relief.
Benefits of GroundingImmediate Relief from AnxietyWhen you’re struggling with emotional overwhelm, anxiety, or carrying the weight of past trauma, grounding techniques offer you a proven path to reclaim your inner peace and stability. By gently guiding your attention back to this present moment, these powerful tools help soothe your nervous system and provide you with immediate relief from panic attacks or that crushing sense of anxiety that can feel impossible to escape.
Building Long-Term ResilienceWhen you practice grounding strategies consistently, you’re giving yourself reliable, expert-backed tools to navigate stress and regain that sense of control that trauma and anxiety can steal from you—even when your world feels like it’s spinning out of control.
These aren’t just crisis interventions—they’re life-changing practices you can weave into your daily routine to nurture your overall emotional well-being and build lasting resilience. Over time, grounding helps you develop deeper self-awareness, empowering you to recognize the early warning signs when overwhelm begins to creep in and respond with the effective coping strategies that truly work. Whether you’re facing a particularly challenging day at work, navigating a difficult conversation that triggers old wounds, or working through the complex aftermath of trauma, grounding techniques provide you with a reliable anchor to the present moment, helping you reduce emotional distress while building the inner strength and resilience you need to face whatever challenges your healing journey brings.
Now that you know the benefits, let’s explore the essential grounding techniques specifically adapted for hypervigilance and how to categorize them for your needs.
Essential Grounding Techniques for HypervigilanceGrounding techniques can be categorized into sensory, mental, and physical strategies. Sensory grounding uses your five senses to anchor you in the present moment, mental grounding involves cognitive exercises to redirect your thoughts, and physical grounding focuses on bodily sensations and movements to establish a sense of stability. These categories often overlap and can be combined for a more comprehensive approach, allowing you to tailor your grounding practice to your unique needs and preferences.
The basics of grounding techniques often include simple mental exercises, such as reciting familiar facts or basic sequences, to help manage anxiety and refocus your mind. Some grounding techniques use categories to help you choose and organize sensory details or thoughts, making it easier to structure your focus and decision-making. These approaches help shift your focus from internal anxiety and overwhelming thoughts to concrete, observable details in your immediate surroundings. Grounding techniques can create space from distressing feelings in nearly any situation and help control symptoms of trauma by turning your attention away from thoughts, memories, or worries and refocusing on the present moment.
Sensory-Based Grounding MethodsVisual grounding involves systematically scanning your environment and noting specific details of safe objects around you. Look for things you can see clearly—the texture of fabric on furniture, patterns in wood grain, or the way light hits different surfaces. This technique allows you to practice grounding while maintaining visual awareness of your space.
Tactile grounding focuses on physical sensations you can feel right now. Notice the temperature and texture of your clothing against your skin, the feeling of your feet in your shoes, or the texture of objects within reach. You might hold an ice cube and describe how the cold water feels as it melts, or run your fingers along different surfaces to notice varying textures.
Auditory grounding involves identifying and categorizing sounds in your environment. Listen for things you can hear—traffic outside, the hum of appliances, or trees blowing in the wind. This helps your brain process environmental information systematically rather than treating all sounds as potential threats.
Body Awareness TechniquesProgressive muscle awareness helps you notice tension patterns throughout your body without forcing relaxation. For increased mindfulness and body awareness, begin your body scan at the head and move downward, observing sensations in your head, shoulders, legs, and other body parts. Instead of trying to release tension immediately, simply notice where you hold stress and acknowledge these physical sensations without judgment.
Feet-on-floor grounding creates connection to a stable surface beneath you. While sitting or standing, focus on the feeling of your feet making contact with the ground. Press down slightly and notice how this solid surface supports your weight, helping your nervous system register stability in your immediate environment.
Posture adjustments can signal safety to your nervous system through body positioning. Sit with your back against a wall or chair when possible, allowing you to maintain visual awareness of your surroundings while feeling supported. These small changes help your brain recognize environmental safety cues.
Breathing Regulation StrategiesBreathing techniques for hypervigilance focus on nervous system regulation without creating feelings of vulnerability. Unlike traditional deep breathing that might feel unsafe, these approaches help you notice your breath patterns while maintaining alertness to your surroundings.
Box breathing provides structure for nervous system regulation through predictable patterns. This technique involves breathing in specific counts that create rhythm and predictability, helping your brain shift from chaos to order without losing environmental awareness.
Breath awareness without forcing changes allows you to notice your natural breathing patterns without trying to control them immediately. Simply observe whether your breathing feels rapid, shallow, or tense, acknowledging these patterns as information about your current nervous system state.
With these essential techniques in mind, the next section will offer practical tips to help you maximize the effectiveness of your grounding practice and personalize it for your daily life.
Tips for Effective GroundingEngaging Your SensesTo maximize the therapeutic benefits of grounding techniques, you’ll want to begin by intentionally connecting with your physical sensations and immediate environment. Our expert therapists recommend starting with purposeful deep breathing—observe the rhythmic rise and fall of your chest and feel the life-giving air flowing into your lungs. Direct your attention to the grounding sensation of your feet making contact with the floor or the supportive presence of your chair. Engage all your senses systematically by scanning your surroundings and naming what you observe, tuning into the sounds that surround you, and becoming aware of any scents or tastes present in this moment.
As an example, you might focus on the gentle flow of the breath through your nostrils, the natural symphony of birds beyond your window, or the comforting texture of the fabric you’re wearing. These precise sensory details serve as powerful anchors that root you firmly in the present moment while redirecting your mind away from anxious thought patterns.
Personalizing Your PracticeWhat makes these evidence-based techniques particularly valuable is their remarkable versatility—you can practice them in your home, workplace, or any public setting—providing you with a reliable tool for managing stress and anxiety wherever life takes you. We encourage you to approach this practice with patience and self-compassion as you explore different techniques, paying close attention to which approaches leave you feeling most centered and at peace. Through consistent practice, you’ll develop a personalized toolkit that serves your unique needs and supports your journey toward greater emotional resilience.
Now that you have tips for effective grounding, let’s move on to step-by-step calming protocols you can use during moments of high alert or overwhelm.
Step-by-Step Calming ProtocolsWhen hypervigilance peaks and you feel overwhelmed by constant alertness, structured protocols provide concrete steps to follow when your brain feels scattered and unable to focus on abstract coping strategies. Mental grounding techniques, such as using self-talk, naming your age and location, or reciting specific statements to confirm reality, can help anchor you in the present moment and reduce panic.
The 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding Exercise for SafetyWhen to use this: During moments of high alert, especially during panic, or when feeling unsafe in your environment.
- Notice 5 things you can see:
Look around and identify five specific visual details. You can use categories to choose what to focus on, such as objects that signal safety, exits, or familiar items. For example, “I see the door handle, my water bottle, the pattern on this chair, the window showing daylight outside, and my phone within arm’s reach.” - Identify 4 things you can touch:
Focus on four different textures or surfaces you can physically feel right now. Prioritize stable, comforting sensations like “the solid armrest under my hand, the soft fabric of my shirt, the cool surface of this table, and the firm ground beneath my feet.” - Listen for 3 distinct sounds:
Use categories to choose and organize the sounds you hear, such as safe, neutral, or needing attention. For example, “I hear the refrigerator humming (safe), cars passing outside (neutral), and someone walking upstairs (checking for familiarity).” - Recognize 2 scents in your environment:
Notice two things you can smell that feel familiar or neutral, such as “the scent of my coffee and the clean smell of this room.” - Name 1 thing you can taste:
Identify one taste currently in your mouth, often residual from food, drink, or even the neutral taste of your own mouth.
This adaptation allows you to practice grounding techniques while maintaining the environmental awareness your nervous system requires for feeling safe.
Box Breathing for Nervous System RegulationWhen to use this: For ongoing nervous system activation, chronic hypervigilance, or when you need to calm down without losing alertness.
- Inhale for 4 counts:
Breathe in slowly through your nose while counting to four, maintaining awareness of your surroundings rather than closing your eyes. - Hold breath for 4 counts:
Pause your breathing while staying alert to your environment, counting “1, 2, 3, 4” silently. - Exhale for 4 counts:
Release your breath slowly through your mouth while maintaining your environmental scan. - Hold empty lungs for 4 counts:
Pause before your next breath, staying present and aware.
Repeat this cycle for 5-10 rounds or until you notice your nervous system activation decreasing. Practice this technique with your eyes open and positioned where you can maintain visual awareness of your space.
Building Predictable Daily RoutinesPredictable routines signal safety to hypervigilant nervous systems by reducing the cognitive load of constant environmental assessment. When your brain knows what to expect, it can allocate less energy to threat detection and more to nervous system regulation.
Create a morning safety scan routine that systematically checks your environment in a structured way. This might involve looking out windows, checking doors, and noting familiar objects in their expected places. This routine satisfies your nervous system’s need for environmental awareness while building confidence through predictability.
Schedule grounding breaks throughout your day at consistent times. Set reminders to practice techniques like the 5-4-3-2-1 exercise or box breathing for just a few minutes every few hours. These scheduled check-ins help prevent nervous system activation from building to overwhelming levels.
Establish an evening wind-down protocol that transitions your nervous system from hypervigilance to rest. This routine might include dimming lights at a specific time, doing a final environmental scan, practicing breathing techniques, and engaging in predictable calming activities that signal safety to your brain.
With these step-by-step protocols, you can respond effectively to moments of high alert. Next, let’s explore how to create grounding spaces that support your ongoing well-being.
Favorite Places for GroundingEstablishing a designated grounding space represents a clinically proven strategy that our experienced therapists consistently recommend for clients experiencing overwhelming emotions or acute distress. This therapeutic anchor point may be a physical location—such as a serene park setting, a thoughtfully arranged corner of your living space, or a window-side retreat where you can observe natural movement that promotes nervous system regulation. Alternatively, you can harness the power of guided visualization by creating a deeply personalized mental sanctuary—perhaps a sun-drenched coastal environment, a peaceful woodland setting, or an alpine meadow—where your mind can access feelings of safety and profound calm.
When therapeutic grounding becomes necessary, gently close your eyes in a safe environment, or engage your mind’s eye to access this carefully cultivated space. Our expert approach involves full sensory engagement: consciously observe the visual elements and spatial relationships, attune to the auditory landscape, notice aromatic details, and feel the tactile sensations against your skin. Allow your nervous system to naturally settle into the restorative feelings this therapeutic space provides. You can also establish a physical grounding environment in your home by integrating evidence-based comfort elements such as living plants, weighted textiles, or carefully calibrated lighting. These personalized therapeutic spaces, whether physically present or mentally constructed, serve as powerful clinical tools for stress management and the restoration of emotional equilibrium.
Once you have a favorite grounding place, you can further enhance your self-care by integrating grounding into your daily routines and combining it with other wellness practices.
Grounding for Self-CareIntegrating Grounding into Daily LifeIntegrating grounding techniques into your personalized self-care routine represents a transformative approach to supporting your emotional resilience and managing the stress that life inevitably brings. As you navigate your healing journey, these evidence-based practices can be seamlessly woven into your moments of restoration—whether you’re engaging in mindful meditation, therapeutic stretching, or taking intentional walks that reconnect you with the present moment.
Combining Grounding with Other Self-Care PracticesWhen you combine grounding with other therapeutic self-care modalities like reflective journaling, restorative yoga, or immersing yourself in nature’s healing presence, you amplify their profound calming effects and create a comprehensive toolkit for emotional well-being.
By establishing grounding as a consistent foundation in your daily routine, you grant yourself the invaluable permission to pause, mindfully check in with your body’s wisdom, and reclaim your sense of agency when life’s challenges feel overwhelming. These specialized techniques empower you to respond to emotional distress with the compassion and patience you deserve, replacing self-judgment with self-advocacy. Your healing journey is a deeply personal process, and it’s not only acceptable but necessary to honor your pace as you explore and integrate new, evidence-based strategies for managing stress and nurturing your emotional well-being—positive change is not only possible, it’s within your reach.
Grounding for self-care lays the foundation for emotional regulation, which we’ll discuss in the next section.
Grounding and Emotional RegulationWhen your emotions feel overwhelming or difficult to navigate, know that you don’t have to face this struggle alone. Grounding techniques offer you a specialized, proven path to reclaim your emotional balance by anchoring you firmly in the present moment. These expert-backed approaches help you tune into your physical sensations, providing your nervous system with the high-quality care it needs to find calm. This compassionate practice creates a safe space where you can truly notice what you’re experiencing and respond with intention, rather than being swept away by emotional overwhelm.
Your journey toward emotional resilience doesn’t end with immediate relief—it grows stronger with each grounding practice. As you commit to this personalized approach to healing, you’ll discover a deeper attunement to your emotional needs and develop the confidence to integrate other therapeutic strategies into your life. Whether you’re drawn to mindfulness, creative expression, or cognitive-behavioral techniques, grounding becomes your foundation for accessing these powerful tools. By prioritizing this essential practice, you’re not just managing difficult moments—you’re empowering yourself to navigate life’s challenges with the specialized care, emotional well-being, and unshakeable confidence you deserve.
Next, let’s address common challenges people face when using grounding techniques for hypervigilance and how to overcome them.
Common Challenges and SolutionsPeople implementing grounding techniques for hypervigilance often encounter specific obstacles that differ from general anxiety management, requiring adapted approaches that honor both the need for calm and the need for safety. Many people tend to experience negative thoughts or habitual responses, such as disconnecting from their bodies or developing certain symptoms, when trying to use grounding techniques for hypervigilance.
| Challenge | Solution | | --- | --- | | Feeling Vulnerable During Grounding Exercises | Keep your eyes open during techniques, position yourself with your back to a wall or solid surface, and practice initially in familiar safe spaces where you know the environment well. | | Racing Thoughts Interrupting Focus | Use counting-based grounding techniques, engage physical sensations more strongly through touch or movement, and practice shorter grounding sessions initially to build tolerance gradually. | | Techniques Not Working During High Stress | Start with the simplest techniques during calm moments to build familiarity, gradually increase complexity as your nervous system learns to regulate, and develop backup micro-grounding techniques you can use anywhere. |
Begin with the basics of grounding techniques, such as reciting familiar facts or basic sequences (like counting or naming days of the week), before progressing to more complex strategies. Your nervous system needs practice recognizing safety cues before it can access more complex regulation strategies. Begin with basic techniques like noticing three things you can see when you’re already relatively calm, building your capacity to use grounding strategies when stress levels increase.
With these solutions, you can adapt your grounding practice to overcome obstacles and build confidence in your ability to self-regulate.
Conclusion and Next StepsHypervigilance represents your nervous system’s attempt to protect you, and effective grounding techniques work with this protective instinct rather than against it. Through consistent practice of awareness-maintaining grounding strategies, you can help your nervous system find regulation while honoring your need for environmental safety.
To get started:
- Choose one sensory grounding technique to practice today when you feel calm, building familiarity before using it during stress.
- Implement box breathing during one routine daily activity, such as drinking your morning coffee or before meals.
- Identify one predictable routine to establish this week that signals safety to your nervous system.
If you ever feel overwhelmed or in crisis, remember it’s important to talk to a trusted person or mental health professional for support. Reaching out and talking to someone can help you feel safer and more supported.
“How couples argue and disagree about issues appears to be more consequential to the success of marriage than what they argue about or how often they experience conflicts.”
To reword the above quote taken from an article by Hanzal and Segrin in the Journal of Family Communication, you could simply say “how we fight has far more influence on the future of our marriage, than what we fight about”.
Therefore, our fighting style, or how we fight, really matters.
Conflict in marriage arises from differences in preferences, backgrounds, and values between partners. Conflict in marriage is a natural and inevitable part of relationships, as two individuals bring together their unique perspectives, habits, and expectations.
Before I get into the different styles of fighting, we need to be aware that gender differences make a big difference in our fights. In fact, a husband and a wife will experience the same fight differently. Not just because they have different perspectives, but because they are different genders.
You might not be a typical couple, and that’s not necessarily a problem, but the following things, about how most couples operate are good to keep in mind.
Studies show women tend to be more negative in conflict and use confrontational behaviors that say “this is all about me”, rather than the marriage. The behaviors include being demanding, hostile, threatening, insulting and insisting that all the change should come from their husband. Research shows that wives tend to use more destructive conflict behaviors than husbands, which can contribute to higher divorce rates.
But to generalize men as well for a moment… Men are more likely to avoid. They get scared of the big emotions, so feel safer avoiding them altogether. Withdrawal behaviors, such as keeping quiet or leaving to cool down, especially when used by either husband, are linked to higher divorce rates.
Another thing for men to keep in mind is that the less influence a woman feels she has in her marriage, the bigger the artillery she has to use to gain influence, so the more confrontational she will be.
Husbands, if you want a happier wife, receive her influence!
Remember, both husband and wife have the same end goal of trying to save the marriage, but they come at it from two completely different angles. Couples who engage in a demand-withdraw pattern, where one partner demands and the other spouse withdraws, are at a higher risk for divorce.
Not only do they have different perspectives, but conflict behaviors in the early years of marriage can predict divorce rates over a span of 16 years. Some conflicts in marriage are perpetual and rooted in fundamental differences in personality or lifestyle, and unresolvable conflicts are inherent in all relationships because each partner is a unique person with their own reality. Nearly 70% of all marriage conflicts are considered perpetual and essentially unresolvable, but healthy conflict in marriage can lead to growth and deeper intimacy when managed well.
Introduction to ConflictIf you’re reading this, you likely understand that conflict is a natural part of your relationship journey—and yes, that includes your marriage. No matter how deeply you love your spouse, you will face moments when disagreements surface—whether they center on finances, parenting decisions, control dynamics, or simply the overwhelming pressures of daily life. Here’s what truly matters: it’s not whether conflict happens in your relationship, but how you and your partner navigate these challenges together as a united team.
Learning to resolve conflict in a healthy, constructive way represents one of the most transformative skills you can develop for building the strong, loving marriage you deserve. Your marital conflicts often emerge from the beautiful complexity of bringing together two unique individuals—each of you carries distinct opinions, values, and personality traits that make you who you are. The key lies in approaching these differences with genuine mutual respect and a deep willingness to understand not only your own emotional experience, but your partner’s inner world as well.
Effective conflict resolution begins with developing strong communication skills that will serve your relationship for years to come. This means you’ll practice active listening with intention, express your feelings with honesty and vulnerability (while avoiding the destructive patterns of finger-pointing or blame), and together create a safe emotional space where both of you feel truly heard and valued. Relationship expert John Gottman’s research demonstrates that couples who invest in truly listening and empathizing with each other experience far greater success in resolving conflicts and actually strengthening their bond through these challenges.
It’s also essential for you to recognize that some disagreements—what Gottman identifies as “perpetual conflicts”—may never find complete resolution, and that’s perfectly normal. Rather than allowing these ongoing issues to create resentment or letting yourselves go to bed carrying anger, you and your partner can work collaboratively to address the deeper underlying concerns and discover constructive pathways forward. By genuinely acknowledging each other’s perspectives and functioning as a true partnership, you can prevent minor tensions from escalating into major threats to your relationship’s foundation.
When you or your spouse feels hurt or misunderstood, addressing those vulnerable feelings with genuine care and shared responsibility becomes absolutely crucial. By avoiding blame and focusing your energy on deep understanding, both of you can feel supported and valued, even during moments of disagreement. Remember, your goal isn’t to “win” any argument, but to discover solutions that honor both of your needs while strengthening the intimate connection you share.
By making conflict resolution a central priority in your marriage, you’re making a profound investment in a relationship that can not only survive life’s inevitable challenges but actually emerge stronger and more resilient over time. Whether you’re working through a specific difficult situation or simply navigating the everyday complexities of married life, developing the skills to manage conflict with empathy, respect, and open communication will help you build the loving, lasting partnership you both envision for your future together.
Anger in Marital ConflictOne thing that surprised us in the research for this topic, was that an angry wife has a far greater negative impact on marital satisfaction than an equally angry husband. The Proverb that says ”It is better to live in a desert land than with a quarrelsome and fretful woman” apparently is very true!
It’s important to remember that hurt feelings in marriage can occur even when neither spouse has done anything wrong, often due to unmet expectations.
Wives need to take their anger seriously! Yes, male anger can be more dangerous (and I don’t want to minimize that in any ways, but in non-abusive marriages a wife’s anger not only lowers their marriage satisfaction but their husband’s as well.
The angrier we become (this goes for both husbands and wives but I’m specifically thinking of women), the more tempted we are to use nasty behavior such as demand, withdrawal, contempt, and criticism; all of which are particularly corrosive to marital well-being. Instead, expressing feelings openly and calmly, and acknowledging when you or your spouse feel hurt, can prevent anger from festering and help foster understanding and empathy.
When anger has caused hurt, offering a genuine apology is valuable—sincere apologies can help heal wounds and strengthen the bond between partners.
StylesDr. John Gottman identified several marital conflict styles that describe how couples typically handle disagreements. Every marriage has its own particular set of disagreements, often rooted in the unique backgrounds, temperaments, and experiences of the two individuals involved. These differences naturally lead to relationship problems, as couples encounter conflicting desires and expectations. For example, a typical relationship problem might involve disagreements about money, division of chores, or parenting approaches. Couples often find themselves having the same argument repeatedly without resolution, which can lead to feelings of unfair treatment and misunderstanding. It’s important to recognize that most unresolvable marriage conflicts involve differences of opinion rather than moral issues, making it possible for couples to agree to disagree and address these challenges constructively.
This model of fighting styles is taken from Dr. Gottman’s study in 1993. The first three are functional and work fine. The last two are considered unstable.
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AvoidersTypical Behaviors
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Avoiders don’t think they are avoiders but don’t have any specific strategies for resolving conflict.
- They may wait stuff out or even talk stuff out, but never really go deep with each other.
- They kind of state their points, reaffirm their common ground and move on after coming up with some ambiguous solution.
Impact on Marriage
- When issues are left unresolved, couples may end up feeling distant and lonely.
- Often have the same argument repeatedly without resolution, leading to feelings of unfair treatment and misunderstanding.
- Avoiders tend to shy away from open conversation, which is essential to solve problems and build intimacy.
- Couples who avoid discussing their differences are less happy over time, particularly women.
Tips for Improvement
- Agree to start opening up to each other and stop bottling up issues in your marriage.
- Practice active listening and make time for honest conversations.
- Consider taking a communication and conflict resolution course like Talk To Me 101.
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Compromise and find solutions that benefit both partners, such as alternating preferences for vacations or family gatherings.
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VolatilesTypical Behaviors
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Volatiles come straight at each other.
- They disagree and try to persuade each other.
- They produce a lot of drama: both positive and negative.
- Value arguing and really work hard at convincing each other.
Impact on Marriage
- While they value arguing, it’s important for volatiles to focus on expressing feelings openly and having constructive conversations, rather than just arguing.
- Healthy conversation—where both partners actively listen and share their emotions without blame—can help resolve marriage conflict more effectively.
- These folks can bicker pretty good but passionate love-making will likely follow.
Tips for Improvement
- Adhere to good ground rules for arguments.
- Be careful not to shift to hostile behaviors.
- Maintain a solid fondness and admiration system as a base in your marriage.
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Focus on finding solutions together, not just winning arguments.
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Validators and Mutual RespectTypical Behaviors
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Validators tend to walk the middle line.
- There is conflict but there’s ease and calm too and each spouse is trying to validate the other.
- This could look like clear empathy or a lot of “Mm hmm’s”.
Impact on Marriage
- Validators show empathy by actively listening to understand the other’s feelings, rather than just responding.
- Acknowledging each other’s feelings and viewpoints helps build a sense of intimacy and mutual respect.
- Listening and acknowledging is more important than winning the argument.
- This is a calmer approach to marriage, and it sounds rosy (and is!) but the romance can dissipate and the marriage can end up as a close friendship.
Tips for Improvement
- Watch out for over-empathizing to the point of avoiding necessary, honest feedback.
- Tell your spouse the uncomfortable things they may need to hear.
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Use a solution-oriented approach to transform conflicts into opportunities for deeper connection.
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HostilesTypical Behaviors
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Hostiles have very negative conversations.
- There is always lots of defensiveness, lots of globalizing and each spouse is very judgmental.
Impact on Marriage
- Destructive conflict behaviors, such as criticism and yelling, are linked to higher divorce rates.
- Focusing on who is ‘wrong’ or assigning blame can escalate marriage conflict and further damage the relationship.
- It is always a downward spiral.
Tips for Improvement
- Actively seek help, such as reading Dr. Gottman’s books or pursuing marriage counseling.
- Practice active listening and use ‘I’ statements.
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Set boundaries and prioritize quality time to rebuild trust.
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Hostile/Detached and Perpetual ConflictsTypical Behaviors
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Hostile/Detached couples normally have little or no emotional involvement with each other.
- Occasionally they may get into a hostile spat, often about trivial matters.
Impact on Marriage
- Emotional distancing and lack of involvement from one or the other partner can lead to ongoing relationship problems and feelings of disconnection.
- Intimacy issues often arise when partners have mismatched needs for physical or emotional closeness, which can undermine the health and longevity of the marriage.
Tips for Improvement
- Seek professional help to address emotional distance and rebuild connection.
- Focus on increasing emotional involvement and addressing underlying issues.
So, what kind of couple are you?
Ideally, you want to be validators and have a little avoidance so you know you’re normal and then a little sprinkle of volatility just to spice things up a bit!
How Can We Do Better at Conflict Resolution?Here are actionable steps for each conflict style:
Avoiders
- Agree to start opening up to each other and stop bottling up issues in your marriage.
- Practice teamwork and active listening.
- Realize and accept each person’s reality.
- Take a communication and conflict resolution course like Talk To Me 101.
- Compromise and find creative solutions that honor both partners’ positions.
Volatiles
- Stick to good ground rules during disagreements.
- Avoid shifting into hostile behaviors.
- Maintain a strong foundation of fondness and admiration.
- Focus on mutual support and understanding.
Validators
- Be mindful of over-empathizing; sometimes honest feedback is necessary.
- Communicate uncomfortable truths when needed.
- Use a solution-oriented approach to turn conflicts into opportunities for growth.
Hostiles or Hostile/Detached
- Actively seek help, such as reading Dr. Gottman’s books or pursuing marriage counseling.
- Practice active listening and use ‘I’ statements.
- Set boundaries, ensure financial transparency, and prioritize quality time.
- Build trust through honesty and address defensiveness.
- Work towards compromise and rebuilding connection.
Image courtesy of Raul Lieberwirth under the Creative Commons license.
t just lying; it is a systematic dismantling of your reality. We discuss:The Red Flags: How to distinguish between a normal disagreement and calculated manipulation (like the DARVO tactic).The Psychology: Why does someone gaslight? Is it always malicious, or is it sometimes a defense mechanism for their own shame?The Way Out: Practical, compassionate steps to stop arguing with a distorted reality, document the truth, and rebuild trust in your own intuition.You are not imagining things, and you are not alone.Connect with Therapevo: If you are ready to reclaim your reality, our specialized therapists are here to help. 👉 Book a Free 20-Minute Consultation: https://therapevo.com/domestic-abuse-trauma/
Discovering that your partner might be struggling with sex addiction can feel overwhelming and frightening. You may be experiencing confusion, deep hurt, or uncertainty about your next steps. If you’re asking yourself, “Is my partner a sex addict?” this article is here to provide you with the understanding and clarity you deserve during this difficult time.
Sexual addiction, also known as compulsive sexual behavior or hypersexual disorder, is a complex mental health condition that affects many individuals and the people who love them. Recognizing the signs and understanding the true nature of sex addiction becomes a powerful starting point for addressing its impact on your partner, your relationship, and your emotional well-being.
Key Points in This Article Understanding Sex Addiction: Sex addiction is a mental health condition rooted in emotional and psychological wounds, characterized by compulsive behaviors similar to other addictions, affecting about 3% to 10% of the population. * Distinguishing Sex Addiction from Healthy Sexuality and Porn Addiction: Unlike healthy sexuality, which fosters emotional connection, sex addiction involves secrecy, shame, and behaviors used to avoid difficult emotions, often linked with broader compulsive sexual activities and pornography use. * Signs, Symptoms, and Causes of Sex Addiction: Signs include loss of control, preoccupation with sexual thoughts, risky behaviors, and continuation despite negative consequences, often caused by trauma, family background, neurochemical factors, and co-occurring mental health conditions. * Treatment and Support Options for Sex Addiction: Effective treatment includes individual, group, and couples therapy, sometimes medication, and support groups like Sex Addicts Anonymous, focusing on managing urges, addressing emotional wounds, and rebuilding trust. * Supporting Partners and Moving Toward Recovery:* Supporting a partner involves encouraging professional help, honest communication, boundaries, and patience, with recovery being a long-term process that can restore trust and foster emotional healing.
What Is Sex Addiction?Sex addiction is a real, tangible challenge rooted in deeper emotional and psychological wounds—not simply a relationship issue or a matter of willpower. It’s crucial for you to understand that sex addiction isn’t caused by a lack of love or attraction toward you; rather, it stems from underlying psychological struggles that require specialized, professional support.
Sex addiction mirrors other addictions, such as substance abuse, involving compulsive behaviors, intense cravings, and difficulty stopping despite devastating consequences. Studies suggest that sex addiction may affect about 3% to 10% of the general population in North America. Additionally, sex addiction occurs more frequently in men than women, with research indicating that for every two to five males with hypersexuality, one woman is affected.
This article explores what sex addiction truly is, how it differs from healthy sexuality, the underlying causes, and the proven treatment options available for those ready to reclaim their lives from this condition.
Defining Sex AddictionSex addiction is often misunderstood, creating confusion about what actually constitutes compulsive sexual behavior versus a healthy sexual appetite. It’s important for you to understand that sex addiction isn’t simply having a high sex drive or enjoying frequent sexual activity with your partner.
Healthy sexuality involves intimacy, closeness, and affection that foster emotional growth and deeper connection between you and your partner. In contrast, compulsive sexual behavior is characterized by using sexual acts to avoid difficult emotions, ultimately leading to significant amounts of shame, lies, betrayal and alienation within your relationship.
Sex Addiction vs. Porn AddictionSex addiction is also distinct from porn addiction, though the two can be interconnected. While some individuals struggling with sex addiction may frequently engage in pornography or phone sex, sexual addiction encompasses a much broader range of compulsive sexual behaviors.
These behaviors include reckless sexual activity, excessive masturbation, frequent one-night stands, infidelity, paying for sexual services, seeking out strangers for sexual encounters, or involvement with sex workers and strip clubs. Cheating on you as their partner is a behavior that arises from the compulsive nature of sex addiction, creating even deeper wounds in your relationship.
Moreover, sex addiction is not synonymous with sex offending, although many sex offenders may also struggle with sexual addiction.
Criteria for Sex AddictionMental health professionals rely on specific criteria to identify this disorder, including:
- Loss of control over sexual actions and compulsive behaviors despite repeated efforts to stop.
- Preoccupation with sexual thoughts and fantasies that dominate daily life.
- Inability to fulfill personal, professional, or relational obligations due to compulsive sexual behavior.
- Continuation of sexual activities despite devastating consequences such as relationship breakdown, legal problems, or physical and mental health deterioration.
- Escalation of sexual behaviors to satisfy increasing cravings.
- Experiencing withdrawal symptoms when unable to engage in sexual acts.
For example, your partner may find themselves engaging in inappropriate sexual conduct even when it puts their work and/or personal health at risk or interferes with their daily responsibilities.
Sex Addiction AssessmentsSex Addiction Screening Test – Revised (SAST-R)This is one of the most widely used screening tools, which has been used in at least eight published, peer-reviewed empirical studies, and is routinely used in practice at several inpatient residential treatment centers, and by certified sex addiction therapists (CSATs) across the United States, and in other countries (Carnes et al., 2012).
Originated in 1989, and has been subsequently revised to adjust to homosexual or female populations. In our practice, we use this as part of a larger assessment called the SDI which is a very comprehensive bundle of assessments which form an effective basis for planning treatment of sexual addiction.
However, it is freely available on the Internet and is a great tool to use at the start of therapy to begin to understand the severity of your partner’s addiction.
PATHOSBecause the SAST is a little bit long, some folks also developed an assessment called PATHOS.
It’s just six questions long and has had a couple of studies done already to establish its validity (Carnes et al, 2012):
- Do you often find yourself preoccupied with sexual thoughts? (Preoccupied)
- Do you hide some of your sexual behavior from others? (Ashamed)
- Have you ever sought help for sexual behavior you did not like? (Treatment)
- Has anyone been hurt emotionally because of your sexual behavior? (Hurt)
- Do you feel controlled by your sexual desire? (Out of control)
- When you have sex, do you feel depressed afterwards? (Sad)
If your spouse answers “yes” to 3 or more of those questions, we gently recommend that you reach out to a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist who can walk alongside you on this healing journey. Please remember that this is an informal assessment, and there’s always the possibility of false positives or negatives—connecting with a qualified, compassionate clinician will help you gain the clarity and support you deserve for a proper understanding of your situation.
We encourage you to approach self-diagnosis with care and kindness toward yourself. For instance, you might consider the example of a 22-year-old who is struggling with pornography—perhaps viewing it once a week. He could easily answer yes to 4, 5, or even 6 of those questions, but labeling him as a sex addict would really overstate and misrepresent the true nature of his challenge and potentially cause unnecessary distress. Many of the young adults we’ve had the privilege of supporting through pornography concerns find their path to recovery and maintain lasting sobriety after just 10 to 14 counseling sessions.
In contrast, someone with a more complex sex addiction typically embarks on a deeper 3 to 5-year therapeutic journey to build the robust foundation of sobriety and healing they deserve. Your journey is unique, and there’s hope and specialized care available no matter where you find yourself today.
The Addictive CycleAs compulsive sexual behaviors escalate, individuals often experience intense excitement or heightened arousal that reinforces the addictive cycle, making it even harder to break free. This cycle is influenced by the type of dopamine response triggered by different types of sexual stimuli or behaviors, which can further entrench the addiction.
These signs and symptoms reflect a serious impulse control disorder that deserves the addict’s attention and compassionate care. There are various types of proven therapy available to address sex addiction, and treatment is often tailored to your partner’s individual needs and any co-occurring mental health conditions.
If you’re concerned about your own or your partner’s behaviors, take a moment to journal about the patterns you’ve noticed. This can help you determine whether these behaviors fit the patterns of sex addiction and guide you toward the support you both deserve.
Differences Between Addictive and Healthy SexualityUnderstanding the contrast between addictive and healthy sexuality can help you gain clarity about whether your partner’s sexual behaviors might indicate a serious problem.
Characteristics of Addictive SexualityAddictive sexuality often involves shame, secrecy, and dishonesty, frequently compromising personal values and creating self-destructive patterns. It may rely on fear, reenact childhood abuse, disconnect individuals from their authentic selves, and foster a world of unreality.
Addictive sexuality also often includes controlling behaviors or overwhelming urges, as individuals struggle to manage or suppress their sexual impulses. This addiction relates to emotional disconnection and unhealthy patterns in how your partner engages with sexual behaviors, significantly impacting their overall well-being and your relationship.
Characteristics of Healthy SexualityConversely, healthy sexuality promotes positive self-worth, operates within a clear value system, uses intimacy to deepen your connection, and supports emotional regulation and authenticity. It respects boundaries, embraces imperfection, and creates mutually satisfying and consensual experiences.
Healthy sexuality also involves managing conflict and emotions in constructive ways, emphasizing honest and respectful approaches to relationships and personal growth.
Signs and Symptoms of Sex AddictionIf your partner is experiencing compulsive sexual behavior, you may recognize patterns in their life that extend far beyond healthy sexual expression.
They might find themselves feeling overwhelmed by urges to engage in sexual activities—whether through excessive masturbation, frequent pornography use, phone sex, cybersex, or seeking multiple partners—that feel impossible to control, even when these behaviors are causing distress or significant harm to their wellbeing, your relationship, or their daily responsibilities.
That feeling of being unable to stop, despite repeated attempts to regain control, is something many people face on this challenging journey. This ongoing struggle can leave your partner feeling unsatisfied, anxious, or carrying deep shame, and you may notice them spending excessive time and energy on sexual pursuits while other important areas of their life suffer.
Recognizing these signs is actually a powerful first step in your healing journey together. If your partner is struggling with overwhelming sexual impulses or finding it challenging to manage these urges, please know that reaching out for support from a therapist or qualified healthcare professional is not only important—it’s a courageous act of self-care that you both deserve.
Early intervention can make a profound difference in helping your partner reclaim control and significantly improve both of your overall wellbeing. You both deserve compassionate, specialized support, and positive change is not only possible but absolutely achievable with the right guidance.
Causes of Sex AddictionYou may be wondering why your spouse has become addicted to sex, perhaps even speculating if you are to blame. Listen: it is not your fault!
Sex addiction rarely develops due to shortcomings in married sex; it often stems from a complex interplay of personal history prior to marriage, pre-existing mental health conditions, and environmental factors.
Role of Family Background and TraumaFamily backgrounds play a significant role, with many individuals struggling with sex addiction coming from families that are rigid (77% of addicts) and emotionally disengaged (87%).
A striking majority of people struggling with sexual addiction report histories of childhood trauma, including emotional, sexual, and physical abuse. In fact, surveys of this population indicate high prevalences of these issues:
- Emotional abuse: 97%
- Sexual abuse: 81%
- Physical abuse: 72%
These early adverse experiences can leave deep emotional wounds that contribute to compulsive sexual behaviors as a maladaptive coping mechanism. In fact, studies show that a high percentage of people with sex addiction have experienced trauma or co-occurring mental health conditions. Early family dynamics and trauma impact children, shaping their later behaviors and emotional responses into the symptoms you may be observing today.
Influence of Pornography and Internet Chat RoomsWhat about pornography?
Pornography and internet chat rooms can act as catalysts or gateways that amplify sexual addiction by providing easy access to sexual stimuli that fuel obsessive sexual thoughts and urges. The chemical response—particularly the release of dopamine—plays a key role in compulsive sexual behavior, reinforcing the cycle of addiction.
While pornography addiction is often a component of sex addiction, it is important to note that pornography addiction often exists without sex addiction. Most sex addicts are also porn addicts. Most porn addicts are not sex addicts.
Neurobiological FactorsCompulsive sexual behaviors are reinforced by chemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins, which are released during sexual activity and create powerful feelings of pleasure and reward. This neurobiological process is similar to what occurs in many addictions, where repeated dopamine release rewires neural pathways and sustains compulsive behaviors. The type of neurotransmitter most involved in reinforcing these behaviors is dopamine, which is central to the brain’s reward system.
These neurochemicals create a great deal of intensity during peak acting-out moments that cannot be replicated in healthy sexuality. This is what makes sexual behavior in this context addictive. One key shift in recovery becomes the addict’s willingness and commitment to pursue intimacy over intensity.
Co-occurring Mental Health ConditionsOther mental health conditions, such as mood disorders, anxiety disorders, personality disorders, and substance abuse—or other co-addictions—frequently co-occur with sexual addiction. These overlapping challenges can complicate diagnosis and recovery, making professional help from healthcare professionals such as we employ, specializing in mental health and addiction recovery, absolutely vital for your partner’s healing journey.
Impact on RelationshipsWhen sex addiction enters your relationship, the emotional devastation you’re experiencing is both valid and profoundly difficult to navigate. Your feelings of betrayal, hurt, and shattered trust aren’t just understandable—they’re a natural response to having your emotional safety compromised. Many partners of sex addicts experience these emotions as they navigate the broken trust and its impact on their relationship.
Your spouse’s sex addiction can also lead to feelings of insecurity and low self-esteem, as you may question your own worth or role in the relationship. This emotional impact is a natural response to the challenges posed by addiction and highlights the importance of seeking support for both partners. Both you and your partner need to focus on your individual well-being to prevent burnout during the healing process.
You deserve to know that the confusion and uncertainty you’re facing about moving forward is something we see every day in our practice, and there is a clear path through this pain. What transforms relationships isn’t just time, but creating that essential foundation of open, honest communication where both you and your partner can express your deepest feelings without judgment and begin authentic healing together.
The journey to rebuild trust after such profound betrayal requires tremendous courage, but I want you to know that restoration is not only possible—it’s something we witness regularly when couples commit to the healing process with proper support. Rebuilding trust demands consistent effort from both partners, including open communication and mutual accountability.
Your intimacy and connection can be rebuilt stronger than before, though we understand this may feel impossible right now, especially if you’re feeling isolated or emotionally overwhelmed by your partner’s behaviors. As experts who’ve guided countless individuals through this exact journey, we know that understanding the nature of sex addiction becomes your most powerful tool for reclaiming your relationship and your peace of mind.
Working alongside a specialized therapist or connecting with others who truly understand your experience will provide you with proven strategies to process these overwhelming emotions, establish healthy communication patterns, and develop a personalized roadmap that leads you back to trust, intimacy, and the relationship you deserve.
Treatment for Sex AddictionIf you are asking, “Is my partner a sex addict?” and suspect that their compulsive sexual behaviors are causing harm, know that there is genuine hope for recovery and transformation. Treatment for your partner’s sex addiction is multifaceted, addressing not only the sexual behaviors but also the underlying emotional and psychological wounds, as well as the emotional needs of both you and your partner.
Early signs of problematic patterns can sometimes be noticed even during the dating phase, so recognizing these behaviors early becomes a powerful advantage in your healing journey.
Types of TherapyThere are several types of proven therapy available for sex addiction, including individual therapy, group therapy, and eventually couples counseling. In some cases, medications may be used as part of a comprehensive treatment plan to address co-occurring mental health conditions.
The most effective form of treatment for sex addiction involves varying types of therapy, which focus on addressing the root causes of compulsive behaviors and providing you both with practical tools for lasting recovery. Therapy remains the most common and accessible approach to managing and overcoming sex addiction.
Therapies often begin with individual counseling focused on impulse control disorders and managing obsessive sexual thoughts and urges. Emotion-focussed individual therapy (EFIT), trauma therapy and attachment work are frequently the starting points for addressing sex addiction effectively.
For effective treatment, it’s essential to address specific traits and behaviors such as secrecy, denial, and boundary violations. In more severe cases where individual therapy with weekly or biweekly sessions is not creating lasting sobriety, inpatient programs lasting several weeks may be necessary to provide intensive support and structure. However, inpatient rehab is rarely necessary for the treatment of sex addiction.
Recovery is typically a long-term process that requires significant time, effort, and emotional commitment from both you and your spouse.
Support GroupsParticipating in support groups such as Sex Addicts Anonymous is highly encouraged, as these groups provide a community of understanding and accountability, which is crucial for sustaining sobriety and preventing a return to addictive behaviors.
Treatment for PartnersFor you as the partner coping with a loved one’s sex addiction, the emotional toll can be immense, often resembling betrayed partner trauma. Feeling neglected or emotionally abandoned is a common experience for partners of individuals struggling with sex addiction.
Honest conversation, professional guidance, and support groups for partners can help you navigate difficult emotions like self-doubt, anger, and grief. Disclosure of the addiction should be handled carefully and, ideally, with the support of mental health professionals to prevent further harm to your relationship.
It’s important for you to expect emotional ups and downs, possible relapses, and the need to set realistic expectations for the recovery journey. Rebuilding trust after betrayal requires consistent, transparent, and accountable actions over time to restore the foundation of your relationship.
Your ability to recognize and respond to problematic behaviors, as well as to communicate your needs clearly, is essential for healing. Establishing boundaries is a critical step in creating emotional safety for both partners during the recovery process.
The goal of treatment isn’t to dwell on the past, but to move toward recovery, reconnection, and a healthier relationship for both you and your partner.
Addressing Co-occurring ConditionsTreatment options also include addressing co-occurring mental health conditions, such as mood disorders and anxiety, which may contribute to the compulsive sexual behavior. Integrating therapy for substance abuse or other addictive disorders is often necessary for comprehensive care.
For those unable to attend in-person sessions, online therapy options are available, providing accessible and flexible support for individuals seeking help with sex addiction.
Seeking Professional Help and Moving ForwardIf you’re struggling with questions about your partner’s sex addiction, seeking professional help is a critical step toward reclaiming your peace of mind and your relationship. Licensed therapists trained in treating sexual addiction can provide personalized care that respects your partner’s personal values, religious beliefs, and unique circumstances.
They can help uncover the underlying issues driving compulsive sexual behaviors and guide both of you toward healing and genuine recovery. As you move forward, it’s important to regularly check in with yourself and your partner about progress and behaviors.
Regularly monitoring for signs of relapse or ongoing issues can help you stay aware and address concerns early in your journey. Look for specific examples of behaviors or scenarios that may indicate sex addiction, such as secrecy, dishonesty, or repeated patterns of acting out.
Joining a support group or listening to a podcast led by an experienced host in sex addiction recovery can also provide valuable guidance and community support during this challenging time.
Your journey toward managing sexual addiction and restoring emotional well-being is challenging but absolutely possible. With compassion, honesty, and professional support, many individuals and couples find hope and healing beyond the pain of sexual obsession and reckless sexual activity.
If you or your partner are dealing with compulsive sexual behavior or the aftermath of a partner’s sex addiction, consider scheduling a consultation with licensed mental health professionals who specialize in treating sex addiction and related mental health conditions. Taking this step can be the beginning of a healthier, more fulfilling life for you and your relationship.
Maintaining Sobriety and Personal GrowthYour journey toward lasting sobriety and meaningful personal growth in sex addiction recovery is one of the most courageous paths you can take—and you don’t have to walk it alone. Continuing to work with your therapist provides you with proven tools and refined strategies that don’t just help you manage urges, but actually transform how you experience emotional well-being and reclaim your sense of control.
Building a strong support network—whether through trusted friends, understanding family members, or specialized support groups—creates the accountability and encouragement that becomes your foundation for lasting change. Setting realistic goals and celebrating every step forward, no matter how small it may seem, keeps you connected to your progress and fuels the motivation that carries you through challenging moments.
When you prioritize self-care, embrace regular movement, and develop effective stress management techniques, you’re not just reducing relapse risk—you’re actively building the balanced, fulfilling lifestyle you deserve. Remember, your personal growth is an ongoing journey of discovery, and by continuing to nurture your emotional well-being and strengthen your relationships, you’re creating the foundation for the sobriety and happiness that’s truly within your reach.
With your commitment and the right support surrounding you, overcoming sex addiction isn’t just possible—it’s the beginning of the healthier, more authentic future you’re meant to live.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat is sex addiction and how does it differ from healthy sexuality?Sex addiction is a complex mental health condition characterized by compulsive sexual behaviors that are used to avoid difficult emotions, leading to shame and betrayal. Unlike healthy sexuality, which fosters emotional growth and intimacy, sex addiction involves secrecy, dishonesty, and behaviors that can harm relationships and personal well-being.
How can I tell if my partner might be struggling with sex addiction?Signs of sex addiction include loss of control over sexual behaviors despite efforts to stop, preoccupation with sexual thoughts, engaging in risky sexual activities, secrecy, and continuing behaviors despite negative consequences. If your partner exhibits these patterns, it may be helpful to seek professional assessment and support.
What are some common underlying causes of sex addiction?Sex addiction often stems from a combination of factors such as family backgrounds characterized by emotional disengagement or rigidity, histories of childhood trauma like abuse, influences of pornography and internet chat rooms, neurobiological factors involving dopamine and other chemicals, and co-occurring mental health conditions like mood or anxiety disorders.
What treatment options are available for sex addiction?Treatment typically includes individual therapy, group therapy, couples counseling, and sometimes medication to address underlying issues. Evidence-based approaches focus on managing urges, addressing emotional wounds, and rebuilding trust, with support groups like Sex Addicts Anonymous also playing a vital role.
How can I support a partner who is struggling with sex addiction and rebuild trust in our relationship?Supporting a partner involves encouraging professional help, practicing honest communication, establishing healthy boundaries, and participating in therapy together if appropriate. Rebuilding trust takes time and effort, but with compassion, patience, and proper support, recovery and a stronger connection are possible.
s past is affecting your present, our therapists at Therapevo can help. We specialize in couples counseling and trauma-informed care. Book a free, confidential 20-minute consultation today at https://therapevo.com/trauma-therapy/childhood-sexual-abuse-trauma-therapy/
For many performers, the voice can feel like a mystery. You practice the techniques, you know the music, but a persistent block, chronic tension, or crippling stage fright holds you back from your true potential. What if the root of that struggle isn’t in your technique, but in your history?
The body keeps a score of our experiences, and for a singer, whose very instrument is their body, the impact of past trauma can be profound. Unresolved trauma can manifest as physical “body armoring,” a deep sense of being unsafe on stage, and a destructive inner critic.
To explore this powerful connection, Therapevo’s Caleb Simonyi-Gindele sat down with our colleague Ron de Jager. Ron lives at the unique intersection of world-class performance and clinical counselling. As a Doctor of Musical Arts, an accomplished vocalist, and a specialist therapist, he offers a unique and compassionate perspective on what it takes to heal the instrument and set your voice free.
https://youtu.be/h67KrGHF7hg
Here is a polished transcript of their conversation.
Why is a singer’s experience of trauma so profoundly different?Caleb: For our listeners, can you start by explaining one of the powerful statements from your research: “A singer’s body is his or her instrument.” Why does that make a singer’s experience of trauma so profoundly different?
Ron: I started as a pianist, so my instrument was here in front of me. It was me and the instrument, and the audience was there. Then all of a sudden, you take that away and it’s just me. That becomes a much more vulnerable situation.
When you’re vulnerable, more things will start to show up. We might be a little bit naive in thinking that we’ve got it masked and covered very well, but sometimes the audience is pretty perceptive. No matter our best job at covering it, our body will still show certain things. As a singing teacher, I started to become aware of those things, like, “Where is that showing up, why is it showing up, and what is it indicative of?” It’s a symptom of something rather than just being the problem.
Just something like getting nervous—if you get a little nervous when you’re speaking, the voice can start to quiver, you don’t get enough breath underneath it, and all of a sudden you squeak and crack. That body stuff might show up more for singers than other kinds of musicians because it’s just you and your voice out there.
How can past trauma manifest in a singer’s performance?Caleb: You’ve said that trauma affects the entire organism—physical, mental, social, and spiritual. Can you give us an example of how a past trauma, like childhood sexual abuse, might manifest in a singer’s voice or performance in a way that most of us would probably not even recognize?
Ron: For sure. Especially if it’s undealt with, it can show up physically in different ways. Some things that I’ve noticed with singers is locking through the lower abdominal areas, through the solar plexus, and right into the pelvis. It can be in the knees and the buttocks as well. All those areas will just lock and get tense. It can be jaw or tongue tension as well. You can see it sometimes if the individual is really trying to get sound out without releasing; you can see trembling in the lower abdominal area.
Jaw tension is often a position of “we’re not going to let anybody in.” In a place where you’re trying to express very openly and freely, when you’re not letting people in, people can see something’s going on there. If the tongue is really tense, it will pull the larynx high, which means you’re going to have to work extra hard. Imagine if we’ve got tension here, and here, and we’re trying to make a free sound—how much that’s going to hold the singer back, not just in their sound, but in their storytelling. You’re working against all these roadblocks.
How can singing be both healing and re-traumatizing?Caleb: Many people see singing as a joyful and expressive act. How does unresolved trauma create a paradox where the very act of singing can be both a source of potential healing and, simultaneously, a source of re-traumatization?
Ron: Music is such an amazing healer, and we can never underestimate that. From a singer’s standpoint, the fact that we have to inhale from a really deep place and then release breath—that breathing itself is cathartic. But then feeling that all of a sudden we can make sounds, that we actually have a voice and that voice matters.
Often with abuse, the voice is squelched, physically or psychologically. If there was ever a time when the individual felt that their voice didn’t matter, all of a sudden it starts to matter. You have something worth saying. And you don’t have to just say it with words; you can say it with music added to it, because there’s so much more behind it.
At the same time, it can be retraumatizing. I never really thought about this until I was working with singers more and I would ask them to breathe low. You’d think, “Why can’t they let go? Just breathe.” But especially if there’s been childhood sexual abuse, we’re asking them to release the very part of their body where they were violated. There’s no wonder they can’t. So this is a much more gentle process, and you have to be patient. It’s about finding that space that’s safe to let go. That part can be incredibly healing—letting go of the violation as well while you’re breathing.
What is “body armoring” and what are the signs?Caleb: You use the term “body armoring.” In your work with singers, what are the first things you look for that tell you that their technical struggle is possibly more rooted in trauma rather than a lack of training?
Ron: That’s a great question. I think it’s probably the persistence of whatever technical thing that we’re trying to overcome, that there’s just no release in it. When you listen to a singer, some things you watch for are physical things. Is there actual holding on? Is there tension? How about the release of breath? Can they actually just sigh and make it sound consistent?
Then the actual sound can tell you a fair amount. The rate of vibrato, which is just a natural wave if the voice is free. If that vibrato is typically really fast, we call that a tremolo. If it gets really wide, we call that a wobble. That can be from a lack of proper breath movement or hypertension through here. The sound can tell you a lot. And lastly, how they interpret a piece. Are there certain pieces that are traumatic for them that they just can’t connect with?Maybe it’s too close to home for them to connect with where they’re at in their journey.
How does attachment history make the stage feel unsafe?Caleb: Performers often seek validation from an audience. How might a history of insecure attachment, which so often stems from childhood trauma, amplify that need for approval and turn the stage into a place that feels very unsafe?
Ron: If there’s been a time when an attachment has been broken, especially between primary caregivers like a father or mother, it definitely transfers over into, “We want to be accepted and we want to be good enough.” Especially if a parent expected more of a child, and what they did was never good enough. No matter how hard the child strove, they could never reach that full approval.
If we translate that into going in front of an audience, it’s almost like the performer can put the burden of the response on the audience before they’ve even performed. “I know that they’re not going to like me because my technique isn’t up to snuff, and Sally Jane, who just sang before me, is a much stronger singer. They’re going to like her better.” All those thoughts are racing through someone’s head. That’s a huge burden to carry. And then to say, “I’ve got this incredible message I want to share with you,” and yet it’s hampered by all this going on in the mind.
It’s just the hamster wheel. It’s exhausting. So working through where that lack of validation started and how is it different now? And taking that burden off the audience. What if we actually allow them to just respond however they’re going to respond? It’s about trusting the process more than trying to exert so much control over it.
Can trauma cause a literal or psychological loss of voice?Caleb: You wrote, “When the silenced voice is that of a singer, issues of both childhood sexual abuse and singing are compounded.” Can you unpack that a little bit? Are we talking about a literal loss of vocal function, a psychological block, or both?
Ron: It can be both. There’s something called Muscle Tension Dysphonia, which can come from a variety of things, and one of them is trauma. I have worked with singers who have experienced trauma and within a few days, lost their voice because something traumatic happened. The muscles through here get really tight. So it can be psychological that affects the physical, for sure.
Another one is called Mutational Falsetto or Puberphonia. That can happen with young men when they’re going through puberty. It just means the voice doesn’t change. Typically the voice will drop an octave, but with Puberphonia, they’ll go right through it and the voice won’t drop.Those are sometimes indicative of something traumatic that’s happened where the young man just can’t get through into that lower voice.
How can a teacher create safety and avoid triggering a student?Caleb: It was fascinating to read that even specific pedagogical exercises can be triggering for a singer. When a singer works with you, how do you create that sense of safety that allows them to explore their voice without that fear of being re-traumatized?
Ron: I just discovered this more and more into my years of teaching, when I started to become more sensitive towards things that could possibly be triggering. For example, alignment and breathing are the basics of singing. I would get students to stand against a wall to line their body up and feel their shoulders opening back. Some of those positions can be a little bit triggering. If I open my chest up wide, it’s a very open, vulnerable position. You need to be really sensitive to what you’re asking.
Next is breathing. If they’re having a lot of body armoring, especially in the lower region, you find creative ways. Sometimes we can sit on the edge of a chair and bend forward to feel what’s happening. Sometimes that position might not be the best. Sometimes we’ll hang over to connect—that can be very triggering for somebody.And also just being aware of your position in the room so that they’re in no way feeling uncomfortable. It’s about being incredibly sensitive and creating a space where, if an exercise isn’t easy for them, you can be more creative and try something else.
What does the beginning of the therapeutic journey look like for a performer?Caleb: Imagine a professional singer comes to you feeling stuck. Maybe they’ve lost their upper range or are battling crippling performance anxiety. What does the beginning of that journey with you look like, and how do you build that foundation of trust?
Ron: I think just creating a space where it’s okay for them to make ugly sounds. Whatever’s going on—”I lost my upper range,” “I push when I get to my…”—those types of things. It’s, “You know what, that’s okay. There are many who have gone before you.” Just creating that space where you just don’t have to be perfect. There is no perfect singer.
I like to say, “Let’s just make some ugly sounds and see what’s going on.” Just freely going on a discovery adventure together, like, “Let’s see what we find!” The permission to not have it all together opens up space for curiosity, which opens up space for new learning, discovery, and healing. It’s a free space. Let’s just go find what we’re going to find, and it’s okay to find whatever. Let’s look at this together.
Can you share an anonymized story of transformation?Caleb: The goal, of course, is healing and liberation in a person’s voice and body. Could you share an anonymized story of transformation? A client who came with a specific block and what they were able to achieve after working through the underlying trauma?
Ron: Yeah, for sure. There’s one story especially that comes to mind, and this individual has given me her permission to tell her story. A young lady came early on in my career as a professor, and I’m incredibly grateful for what she taught me. She came to my studio and she was a larger-bodied young lady who looked like she should have a big, huge sound. And she was very musical, had sung for quite a while.
We were working in a lesson, and she had this thin, high sound, which is kind of indicative of the larynx being pretty high. We were getting nowhere. Finally, one day we just stopped and I said, “Why don’t you look in the mirror and just say, ‘I’m beautiful.'” 51She looked and said, “I’m beautiful,” and I said, “Maybe we could try that with a little bit more believing behind it.”
And then she broke down and started to explain the trauma that had happened in her life. I wasn’t a counselor at the time, but we recommended that she go and talk to somebody. She did, and she started working through this. She lost a significant amount of weight, which actually really affected her voice. It’s almost like she lost that voice and we had to start rebuilding from the bottom up. She was singing soprano and she turned into this beautiful, big mezzo voice. She went on to her bachelor’s and master’s in singing and has taught for quite a while. It’s just amazing to see that freedom in her story, in her person, and in her singing.
What is one first step a performer can take toward healing?Caleb: For that performer listening right now and thinking, “This is me,” what is one thing you’d encourage them to do today, after this show ends, to start their journey towards reclaiming their voice?
Ron: I just think it’s so important that you talk to somebody. Just to start that journey. In the story of this young lady, she felt safe enough to just say, “Here’s my story.” So just starting to verbalize part of that to anybody who can start walking alongside you. Because stuffing it down just never works. It’s going to manifest itself in some way.
This whole idea that “the body keeps the score”—it really does, and it will start to show up. When singers have trauma and they haven’t ever talked about it, or they’re stuffing it down hoping no one notices, it’s going to show up somewhere. So just that initial bit of talking to anybody who can get you on a path towards healing is just so amazing. And it takes a lot of courage. That first step, it’s the good old “name it to tame it.” There’s something so powerful about stating your truth and sharing your story.
Your Healing JourneyThis conversation highlights a profound truth: the path to a free and authentic voice is often intertwined with the path of personal healing. Recognizing that a vocal block or performance anxiety may be a message from your past is a courageous first step. You don’t have to navigate this journey alone.
If this story resonates with you and you’re ready to explore what healing could look like, our team of specialized, compassionate therapists is here to help.
- Take the first step: Book a free, confidential 20-minute consultation with our intake team to find the right therapist for you.
- Connect with Ron: You can learn more about Ron de Jager and his specialized work with performers on his bio page.
Key Takeaways* Dr. John Gottman’s research identifies four critical predictors of divorce: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling * Safety must come first – marriages involving abuse cannot and should not be repaired until the abusive partner commits to change * Many seemingly hopeless marriages can be saved through emotion-focused therapy when both partners show willingness to reconnect * The presence of fundamental respect, shared values, and mutual commitment to growth often indicates a marriage worth saving * Professional intervention through couples therapy significantly improves outcomes for distressed marriages when both partners participate
https://youtu.be/wvZFraXEKyQ
Asking yourself “how do I know when my marriage is beyond repair” represents one of the most painful moments in any relationship. When your marriage feels broken beyond repair, it’s natural to wonder if the damage can ever be undone. The constant fear that your entire relationship has reached an irretrievable breaking point can create an overwhelming emotional toll on your physical and mental health.
Yet here’s what decades of research in emotion-focused couples therapy reveals: not all marriages that feel beyond repair actually are. While some relationships face truly insurmountable challenges, many couples who believe their marriage is beyond saving can rebuild their emotional connection and create a healthy relationship through professional guidance and mutual commitment to the healing process.
Understanding the difference between a troubled marriage experiencing severe distress and one that’s genuinely beyond repair requires examining specific warning signs, recognizing when safety concerns must take priority, and knowing when hope for rebuilding remains possible.
Immediate Warning Signs Your Marriage May Be In Serious DangerWhen couples find themselves feeling uncertain about their relationship’s future, certain warning signs indicate that immediate intervention is necessary. These symptoms don’t necessarily mean your marriage is beyond repair, but they signal that professional help is urgently needed to prevent further deterioration.
Complete emotional shutdown represents one of the most serious warning signs. When one partner or both partners feel absolutely nothing positive toward each other anymore, the emotional distance has reached a critical point. This goes beyond temporary disconnection during stressful periods—it’s a persistent state where spending time together feels forced and artificial.
Persistent contempt emerges through eye-rolling, name-calling, mocking behavior, and deliberate attempts to make your spouse feel inferior. Unlike healthy disagreements that focus on specific issues, contempt attacks your partner’s character and worth as a person. This toxic environment creates lasting damage to self-esteem and mutual respect.
Total communication breakdown lasting months or years without any genuine attempts at resolution indicates that both partners have essentially given up on genuine communication. When conversations only involve logistics about daily life or escalate immediately into harmful behaviors, the foundation for rebuilding trust becomes severely compromised.
Repeated betrayals involving infidelity, financial deception, or other major violations of trust—especially when accompanied by no genuine remorse or commitment to change—create a pattern that becomes increasingly difficult to overcome. The repeated betrayals destroy the safety necessary for emotional intimacy to survive.
Active avoidance of each other and complete refusal to discuss relationship issues may indicate that one or both partners have emotionally checked out. When couples live separate lives under the same roof and actively avoid quality time together, they’re functioning more like hostile roommates than married partners.
Spouse refuses all forms of marriage counseling or professional intervention, demonstrating an unwillingness to acknowledge problems or work toward solutions. When one partner categorically rejects the possibility of change or growth, the prognosis becomes much more challenging.
The Four Horsemen: Gottman’s Predictors of DivorceDr. John Gottman’s groundbreaking research spanning over four decades has identified four communication patterns that predict divorce with remarkable accuracy. These “Four Horsemen” represent toxic patterns that gradually erode the foundation of even previously strong marriages. Understanding these patterns helps distinguish between relationships experiencing temporary distress and those facing more serious threats.
Criticism vs. ComplaintsHealthy marriages involve addressing problems through specific complaints that focus on particular behaviors or situations. Destructive criticism, however, attacks your partner’s character rather than addressing the underlying issues causing conflict.
Constructive complaint: “I felt hurt when you forgot our anniversary dinner because it’s important to me that we celebrate our milestones together.”
Destructive criticism: “You never remember anything important because you’re completely selfish and don’t care about anyone but yourself.”
Notice how criticism uses absolute language like “always” and “never” while attacking character traits rather than specific actions. This pattern gradually erodes your spouse’s self-esteem and creates defensive reactions that prevent meaningful problem-solving.
Contempt: The Most Dangerous HorsemanAmong the Four Horsemen, contempt stands as the strongest predictor of divorce when left untreated. Contempt involves deliberate attempts to make your partner feel inferior through expressions of disgust, superiority, and emotional cruelty.
Common contempt behaviors include:
- Eye-rolling during conversations
- Name-calling and verbal insults
- Mocking your partner’s concerns or feelings
- Sarcastic responses designed to hurt
- Acting morally superior or talking down to your spouse
Contempt destroys the emotional safety required for vulnerable communication and creates a toxic environment where emotional support becomes impossible. When contempt becomes a regular pattern, it signals that the fundamental respect necessary for a healthy marriage has been severely damaged.
Defensiveness and StonewallingDefensiveness occurs when partners respond to legitimate concerns by playing the victim, making excuses, or counter-attacking rather than taking responsibility for their actions. While occasional defensive reactions are normal, chronic defensiveness prevents couples from resolving conflicts constructively.
Stonewalling involves completely shutting down emotionally during conversations, often accompanied by physical withdrawal like leaving the room or refusing to respond. Men tend to stonewall more frequently than women, often as a response to feeling emotionally overwhelmed or criticized.
Both defensiveness and stonewalling prevent the honest communication necessary for addressing deeper issues in the relationship. When these patterns become entrenched, couples find themselves stuck in negative cycles where every attempt at connection leads to greater emotional distance.
When Safety Must Come First: Marriages Involving AbuseAny marriage involving abuse cannot and should not be repaired until safety is established and the abusive partner demonstrates sustained commitment to change. This represents an absolute boundary where the question of whether the marriage is beyond repair becomes secondary to protecting the victim’s well being.
Physical violence of any kind—hitting, pushing, blocking, throwing objects, or any form of physical intimidation—creates an environment where genuine therapeutic work becomes impossible. The constant fear generated by domestic violence prevents the emotional vulnerability required for healing and rebuilding trust.
Emotional abuse through threats, intimidation, extreme control tactics, isolation from family members, financial abuse, or persistent verbal attacks creates equally harmful psychological damage. Victims of emotional abuse often struggle to recognize the severity of their situation because the abuse may be intermittent or justified by the abuser as “loving” or “caring.”
Critical safety considerations:
The abused partner cannot work on marriage issues while living in constant fear or under coercive control. Professional safety planning and often separation are necessary before any repair attempts can begin. Marriage counseling is actually contraindicated when active abuse is present, as it can escalate danger for the victim.
In these cases, the abusive partner must demonstrate sustained commitment to change through individual therapy specifically addressing abusive behaviors, accountability groups, and consistent behavior modification over an extended period—typically measured in years, not months. Only after these safeguards are in place and the abusive partner is showing sustained commitment to reform over time would it be reasonable to consider engaging in couple’s therapy.
Victims should contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 for confidential support, safety planning, and resources. Local domestic violence organizations can provide legal guidance, emergency housing, and specialized counseling services designed for abuse survivors.
Important note: Again, couples therapy should never be attempted while abuse is ongoing. Individual therapy for both partners, with specialized treatment for the abuser, must occur first. Only after sustained safety and genuine accountability can any form of relationship work be considered.
Signs Your Marriage Can Still Be SavedWhile recognizing warning signs is crucial, understanding when hope remains possible can prevent couples from giving up prematurely on relationships that could be restored. Even marriages experiencing severe distress often retain certain qualities that indicate the relationship feels salvageable with proper professional guidance and mutual commitment.
Presence of Underlying Love and RespectDespite current struggles, you can still identify positive qualities in your partner and genuinely care about their well being. This fundamental respect creates the foundation necessary for rebuilding emotional intimacy, even when ongoing conflict has created significant emotional distance.
Arguments focus primarily on specific issues rather than attacking each other’s character or worth as human beings. While disagreements may be intense, they don’t involve the destructive contempt that makes healing nearly impossible.
Moments of tenderness and genuine connection still occur, even if infrequently. These glimpses of your former bond indicate that the emotional connection isn’t completely severed, providing hope that negative cycles can be interrupted and replaced with positive interactions.
Shared Values and Life VisionCore beliefs about family, integrity, financial responsibility, and major life priorities remain fundamentally aligned. While you may disagree about methods or timing, you share similar visions for your future together and want the same things from life.
Both partners genuinely want the marriage to succeed and express willingness to work toward solutions. This mutual commitment to the relationship, even during difficult periods, provides the motivation necessary for sustained effort in therapy.
Your disagreements stem primarily from external stress, poor communication patterns, or unresolved past hurts rather than fundamental incompatibility in values or life goals. This suggests that learning better ways to resolve conflicts and address underlying issues could restore harmony.
Willingness to Be VulnerableBoth partners can acknowledge their role in current relationship problems without becoming completely defensive. This self awareness and ability to accept feedback creates the foundation for meaningful change and growth. In reality, this attribute is often missing during conflict and may only begin to reemerge after several sessions of couple’s therapy with a properly trained marriage therapist.
What might this look like? Despite feeling hurt or angry, you maintain openness to understanding your spouse’s perspective and genuine curiosity about their experience. This emotional flexibility indicates that empathy and emotional support can be restored.
As well, you recognize that change is necessary (even for yourself) and feel hopeful that positive transformation is possible with proper effort and guidance. When both partners share this mindset, even deeply entrenched patterns can often be modified through focused therapeutic work.
The Emotion-Focused Therapy Perspective on HopeEmotion-Focused Therapy offers tremendous hope for couples wondering if their marriage is beyond repair. Developed by Dr. Sue Johnson, EFT approaches relationship distress through the lens of attachment theory, recognizing that most relationship problems stem from attachment fears and unmet emotional needs rather than fundamental incompatibility.
Remarkable success rates demonstrate EFT’s effectiveness: research shows that 70-73% of couples move from distress to recovery through EFT, while 90% show significant improvement when both partners engage fully in the therapeutic process. These outcomes include couples who initially believed their marriages were beyond saving.
Understanding negative cycles forms the foundation of EFT work. Most distressed couples become trapped in predictable patterns where one partner’s attempt to connect triggers the other’s defensive withdrawal, creating escalating emotional distance. EFT helps couples identify these negative cycles and understand how attachment fears drive seemingly irrational behaviors.
Accessing underlying emotions beneath anger, criticism, and withdrawal reveals the deeper longings for emotional connection that motivate most relationship conflicts. When couples learn to express their attachment needs—desires for comfort, security, and emotional responsiveness—they often discover that they want the same things from their relationship.
Creating new positive cycles becomes possible when couples feel safe enough to express vulnerability and respond to each other’s emotional needs. EFT guides couples through carefully structured conversations that allow them to experience their partner as emotionally available and responsive, gradually rebuilding the emotional bond.
The EFT approach recognizes that even marriages experiencing severe distress often retain the potential for transformation when both partners feel safe enough to engage authentically. This perspective offers hope to couples who might otherwise conclude their relationship has reached an irreparable state.
When External Stressors Are the Primary CulpritMany marriages that feel beyond repair are actually healthy relationships under extraordinary stress. Distinguishing between temporary crisis and fundamental relationship problems can prevent couples from abandoning salvageable marriages during challenging periods.
Financial hardship, job loss, or major life transitions can create overwhelming pressure that temporarily disrupts even strong relationships. When couples face foreclosure, unemployment, business failure, or other economic crises, the stress often manifests as relationship conflict even though the marriage itself remains fundamentally sound.
Health issues, caring for aging parents, or family crises requiring significant time and emotional energy can exhaust couples’ capacity for maintaining their emotional connection. Busy schedules, medical appointments, and caregiving responsibilities can make spending quality time together nearly impossible, creating emotional distance that feels alarming but is actually circumstantial.
Key indicators that stress is the primary problem:
The relationship was strong and satisfying before external pressures mounted. Couples can identify specific events or circumstances that preceded their current difficulties, and both partners recognize these external factors as contributing to their problems.
Both partners understand that stress is the enemy rather than each other. Instead of blaming their spouse for relationship problems, they recognize that external circumstances have created temporary strain on their normally healthy relationship.
Willingness to work together to address external challenges while protecting the relationship demonstrates that the fundamental partnership remains intact. Couples may need temporary support managing stressors while maintaining their commitment to each other.
When external stress is the primary culprit, couples often benefit tremendously from relatively brief therapeutic intervention focused on stress management, communication skills, and maintaining connection during difficult periods.
Getting Professional Help: When and HowRecognizing when and how to seek professional couples therapy can make the difference between a marriage that recovers and one that deteriorates beyond repair. Understanding different therapeutic approaches and knowing what to expect can help couples make informed decisions about their treatment options.
Individual Therapy First In Some CasesCertain situations require individual therapeutic work before couples therapy can be effective. When active addictions are present, the addicted partner must demonstrate sustained commitment to recovery before meaningful relationship work can occur. Addiction creates unpredictability and broken trust that undermines the safety necessary for vulnerable communication.
Ending extra-marital affairs and healing from infidelity often requires individual work for both partners before couples therapy begins. The unfaithful partner needs individual support to understand their motivations and develop the empathy necessary for genuine remorse, while the betrayed partner may need individual help processing trauma and determining their own needs.
Personal mental health issues like untreated depression, anxiety, or trauma can significantly impact relationship dynamics. Addressing these individual concerns often improves each partner’s capacity for emotional regulation and empathy, creating better conditions for successful couples work.
How Emotion-Focused Therapy for Couples Can HelpEFT provides a structured, research-based approach to healing distressed marriages through focused work on emotional connection and attachment bonds. The therapy progresses through specific stages designed to interrupt negative cycles and create new positive patterns of interaction.
Identifying the negative cycle helps couples understand how their individual attachment fears create predictable patterns of conflict and disconnection. Rather than blaming each other, couples learn to see the cycle itself as the problem that needs to be addressed.
Learning about softer, underlying emotions allows partners to move beyond surface-level anger and criticism to express the deeper fears and longings that drive their behavior. This emotional accessibility creates opportunities for genuine empathy and understanding.
Restructuring to a positive cycle occurs when couples learn to express their attachment needs clearly and respond to each other with comfort and reassurance. These new interactions gradually rebuild trust and emotional intimacy, creating a secure bond that can withstand future challenges.
Learning about attachment longings helps couples understand that their conflicts often stem from fundamental human needs for security, comfort, and emotional responsiveness. When these needs are met within the relationship, many other problems become much more manageable.
To learn more about this approach to couple’s therapy, we invite you to check out our couples counseling page and book a free 20 minute consultation call today.
Signs Therapy Is WorkingIncreased emotional safety becomes evident when both partners feel more comfortable expressing vulnerability without fear of attack or rejection. Conversations that previously led to conflict begin producing understanding and connection.
New positive interactions start occurring spontaneously as couples apply skills learned in therapy to their daily lives. These moments of genuine connection provide hope and motivation to continue the therapeutic work.
Better understanding of each other’s underlying needs and fears creates empathy that transforms how couples interpret their partner’s behavior. Actions that previously seemed selfish or uncaring are understood as attempts to meet legitimate emotional needs.
Gradual decrease in the frequency and intensity of negative cycles indicates that new patterns are becoming established. While occasional setbacks are normal, the overall trajectory moves toward greater connection and understanding.
Frequently Asked QuestionsHow long should we try to save our marriage before giving up?There’s no universal timeline, but most marriage counselors recommend at least 6-12 months of genuine effort in therapy (with weekly sessions) before making final decisions about ending the relationship. This timeline assumes both partners are actively participating. The gradual process of rebuilding emotional intimacy and resolving unresolved issues often requires sustained effort over an extended period, particularly when the relationship has been distressed for years.
Can a marriage survive if only one person wants to work on it?While it is less ideal if only one person is attending therapy, if that person does something different and shifts how they approach their relationship is will inevitably compel the other partner to shift as well. There are natural forces of equilibrium that can resist this (known as “homeostasis”), but a marriage can often be influenced by one party getting help. Of course, it is always more helpful if both are willing to engage with a couple’s therapist.
Is it normal to feel hopeless about marriage problems even if they might be fixable?Yes, feeling overwhelmed and hopeless is extremely common in distressed marriages, even when the underlying issues are actually addressable through proper intervention. These intense feelings often reflect emotional flooding and the accumulated emotional toll of ongoing conflict rather than the actual viability of the relationship. Past hurts, unresolved conflicts, and current relationship stress can create a sense of despair that doesn’t necessarily reflect the marriage’s true potential for healing. Professional assessment can help distinguish between temporary emotional overwhelm and genuine incompatibility.
What if we’ve tried other therapists but nothing seems to work?Different therapeutic approaches work better for different couples, and sometimes the issue is the approach rather than the couple. If previous therapy focused primarily on communication skills or behavior modification, consider trying evidence-based approaches specifically designed for couples, such as Emotion-Focused Therapy. Also, keep in mind that any therapist can self-identify as a couples therapist, but only those with post-graduate training and supervision in emperically-validated approaches can be depended on for reliable results. At Therapevo, we require our couples therapists to have this training before they can claim to be a couples therapist.
How do we know if we’re staying together for the wrong reasons?Staying in an unhappy marriage solely due to fear of change, financial concerns, child custody worries, or social pressure—without genuine care and commitment to the relationship itself—often prolongs suffering for everyone involved, including family members. Healthy reasons for working on a troubled marriage include underlying love and respect, shared values, commitment to personal growth, and belief in the relationship’s potential for positive transformation. If you find yourselves living separate lives, feeling like strangers, or experiencing other forms of chronic disconnection without any mutual investment in change, it may be time to seek professional help for rebuilding your relationship.
Key Takeaways* Pornography withdrawal can cause both psychological symptoms (anxiety, depression, irritability) and physical symptoms (insomnia, fatigue, headaches), commonly referred to as porn addiction withdrawal symptoms (PAWS). * The most common porn withdrawal symptoms include intense cravings, mood swings, difficulty concentrating, and sleep disturbances that typically peak within the first week. Additionally, increased sexual thoughts that are difficult to control and irritability are frequently reported. * Withdrawal symptoms occur because regular pornography use alters brain chemistry and dopamine pathways, creating dependency similar to other behavioral addictions. * Symptoms usually last anywhere from a few days to several weeks, with severity depending on frequency and duration of previous pornography use. * Professional support and healthy coping strategies can help manage withdrawal symptoms and prevent relapse during the recovery process.
https://youtu.be/ol8Ypi3v5hk
If you’ve made the brave decision to quit porn, you may find yourself experiencing unexpected physical and emotional changes. These withdrawal symptoms are your brain’s natural response to breaking free from a behavioral addiction that has rewired your neural pathways over time. Professional help is often recommended to manage these symptoms and navigate the recovery process successfully. Understanding what to expect during this recovery journey and having a competent addictions counselor walking through it with you can help you navigate the challenges ahead with greater confidence and self-compassion, leading to stronger sobriety.
The symptoms of pornography withdrawal are real, well-documented, and temporary. While the experience can feel overwhelming, especially in the first few weeks, recognizing these symptoms as part of your healing process is an important step toward lasting recovery and improved well being.
Understanding Pornography WithdrawalPornography withdrawal happens when someone who has developed a strong porn habit suddenly cuts back or stops using pornography altogether. This change sets off a complex series of neurobiological adjustments as the brain learns to function without the artificial dopamine rush that comes from watching porn. These brain changes are similar to those seen in other addictive behaviors, where compulsive use leads to dependence and then withdrawal symptoms. The intensity of these symptoms often relates directly to the severity of the addiction.
When you regularly watch pornography, your brain chemistry—especially the dopamine pathways that govern pleasure, motivation, and reward—undergoes significant shifts. Over time, your brain gets used to these intense dopamine spikes, which can lead to tolerance. This means you might need more stimulating or novel content to feel the same satisfaction as before. This neuroadaptation plays a central role in what makes pornography addictive. Just like other addictive behaviors, repeated pornography use can trigger withdrawal symptoms resembling those experienced in substance addiction. Additionally, changes in libido, including a drop in sexual desire, are common after quitting as the brain recalibrates.
The experience of withdrawal shares many features with other behavioral addictions such as gambling or compulsive gaming. However, unlike drug or substance addiction, porn withdrawal generally does not involve severe physical dangers, though it can produce significant psychological symptoms driven by dopamine dependence. While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) does not currently recognize pornography addiction as a formal diagnosis, compulsive sexual behavior disorder (CSBD) is discussed within the context of behavioral addictions. This highlights the importance of recognizing and understanding these conditions for effective treatment.
It’s important to note that not everyone who stops using pornography will face withdrawal symptoms. Those most likely to experience them are individuals who have engaged in compulsive sexual behavior, used pornography daily over long periods, or relied on porn as their main way to manage stress or sexual release. Early evidence suggests that pornography withdrawal shares traits with other behavioral and addictive disorders, underscoring the need for more research and clinical focus.
Psychological Symptoms of Pornography WithdrawalThe psychological symptoms of pornography withdrawal often emerge within 24-48 hours and represent some of the most challenging aspects of the recovery process. Physical symptoms, such as insomnia and muscle tension, may also accompany these psychological changes. Understanding these mental health changes can help you prepare for what lies ahead.
Anxiety and Panic AttacksMany people experience withdrawal symptoms in the form of heightened anxiety and, in some cases, panic attacks. This anxiety often stems from the brain’s struggle to regulate emotions without its usual coping mechanism. The anxiety may feel particularly intense during times when you would normally watch porn, such as when alone and stressed.
Depression and Emotional NumbnessDepression frequently accompanies porn addiction withdrawal as the brain’s reward system recalibrates. You might experience persistent sadness, feelings of hopelessness, or a condition known as anhedonia – the inability to feel pleasure from activities you once enjoyed. This emotional flatness is temporary but can be particularly distressing during the early recovery period. For other people, withdrawal can actually alleviate symptoms of depression and feelings of numbness.
Intense Cravings and UrgesPerhaps the most significant or likely withdrawal symptom involves powerful cravings to return to pornography use. These urges can be triggered by stress, boredom, loneliness, or even seemingly unrelated stimuli that your brain has associated with porn consumption. The intensity of these cravings typically peaks in the first week but may continue in waves throughout the recovery journey.
Brain Fog and Concentration DifficultiesMany individuals report experiencing brain fog – a mental cloudiness that makes it difficult to think clearly, focus on tasks, or remember information. This cognitive impairment can affect work performance, academic achievement, and decision-making abilities. The brain fog typically improves as your neural pathways heal and adapt to natural stimulation levels.
Mood Swings and IrritabilityEmotional volatility is common during pornography withdrawal. You might find yourself experiencing rapid mood swings, becoming easily frustrated, or having angry outbursts over minor triggers. These emotional fluctuations reflect your brain’s efforts to restore emotional equilibrium without artificial stimulation.
These mood swings or the irritability may also be revealing the fact that your coping mechanism of choice is no longer available to you and so you will need to learn new ways of tolerating, expressing, and processing difficult emotions.
Social Withdrawal and Relationship ChallengesThe recovery process often involves increased social anxiety and a tendency to withdraw from friends, family, and social situations. This isolation may stem from shame about past behaviors, fear of triggers in social settings, or simply the emotional exhaustion that accompanies withdrawal. Again, for other people the withdrawal may actually have the opposite effect of opening you back up to friendships or social networks you may have been drifting away from. Not everyone’s experience is the same!
Physical Symptoms of Pornography WithdrawalWhile pornography addiction is primarily psychological, the physical symptoms during withdrawal can be surprisingly pronounced and uncomfortable.
Sleep Disturbances and InsomniaSleep problems represent one of the most common physical symptoms of porn withdrawal. Many people struggle to fall asleep, experience frequent night wakings, or have vivid dreams related to sexual content. These sleep disturbances occur because pornography often served as a sleep aid, and the brain must now learn alternative ways to wind down. There may also be latent sexual material in your mind and nervous system that will take a while to defuse, sometimes leading to nocturnal emissions (for men).
Fatigue and Low EnergyPersistent tiredness and low energy levels are frequently reported during the early stages of withdrawal. This fatigue results from the brain’s energy-intensive process of neuroplasticity – literally rewiring itself to function without pornography. The fatigue typically improves as the brain adapts to more sustainable energy patterns.
Sexual Dysfunction and Changes in Sexual DesireParadoxically, many people experience a temporary decrease in sexual desire or erectile dysfunction after quitting pornography. This “flatline” period occurs because the brain is readjusting its response to natural sexual stimuli after years of artificial overstimulation. While concerning, this temporary loss of sex drive typically resolves as the brain heals.
Physical Discomfort and TensionHeadaches, muscle aches, and general physical tension are common during withdrawal. Some individuals also report restlessness, difficulty sitting still, and an overall sense of physical discomfort. Less commonly, people may experience nausea, sweating, or mild tremors, particularly during the acute withdrawal phase.
Changes in AppetiteBoth increased and decreased appetite can occur during pornography withdrawal. Some people find themselves eating more as they seek alternative sources of dopamine, while others lose interest in food entirely. Maintaining proper nutrition becomes especially important during this time to support brain health and recovery.
Timeline of Withdrawal SymptomsUnderstanding the typical progression of withdrawal symptoms can help set realistic expectations for your recovery journey. When you quit pornography, it is common to experience withdrawal symptoms as your brain adjusts to the absence of regular dopamine stimulation.
First 24-72 Hours: Peak Intensity
The most intense withdrawal symptoms typically occur within the first three days of stopping pornography use. During this period, you may experience the strongest cravings, most severe mood swings, and greatest physical discomfort. For most people, these symptoms peak within the first one to two weeks. This acute phase represents your brain’s immediate response to the absence of its expected dopamine stimulation.
During this initial phase, the brain undergoes significant neurochemical adjustments as it attempts to recalibrate the reward pathways previously overstimulated by pornography use. The sudden lack of dopamine surges can lead to feelings of restlessness, irritability, and heightened emotional sensitivity. Many individuals report that their other coping mechanisms feel insufficient, leading to increased vulnerability to relapse.
It’s important to recognize that these early withdrawal symptoms, while challenging, are a natural part of the brain’s healing process. Understanding this can help individuals approach recovery with patience and self-compassion. Engaging in supportive activities such as mindfulness, physical exercise, and connecting with support groups can alleviate the intensity of symptoms during this critical period.
Recognizing triggers during this phase is crucial. Situations or emotions previously associated with pornography use may provoke strong urges, so planning ahead to manage these can improve chances of sustained abstinence. Utilizing tools like environmental modifications and behavioral replacements can support individuals through this vulnerable time, setting the foundation for longer-term recovery success.
Week 1-2: Continued Challenge with Gradual Improvement
The first two weeks generally involve continued psychological symptoms, though their intensity may begin to fluctuate. You might experience good days followed by difficult ones, which is entirely normal. Physical symptoms often start improving during this period, though sleep disturbances may persist.
Week 3-4: Noticeable Progress
By the third and fourth weeks, most people notice significant improvement in their symptoms. However, you may still experience occasional “waves” of cravings or emotional difficulty, particularly when exposed to triggers or during times of stress.
Month 2-3: Stabilization Phase
Most withdrawal symptoms resolve within two to three months, though some individuals may experience an extended period of recovery. The brain’s neuroplasticity continues working to restore normal function, and many people report feeling better than they did before their addiction began.
Individual Variation
It’s crucial to remember that withdrawal timelines vary significantly based on individual factors. Some people may feel substantially better within weeks, while others require several months for complete recovery. This variation is normal and doesn’t indicate failure or weakness. Future studies are needed to better understand the variability in withdrawal timelines and symptom progression.
Factors That Influence Withdrawal SeveritySeveral factors determine how severely you might experience withdrawal symptoms and how long they may last. Most research on withdrawal severity is based on the general population rather than clinical samples, so individual experiences may vary.
Duration and Frequency of Use
The length of time you used pornography and how frequently you consumed it significantly impact withdrawal severity. Daily users over multiple years typically experience more intense and prolonged symptoms compared to occasional users.
Type and Intensity of Content
The nature of pornographic content consumed also influences withdrawal difficulty. Those who progressed to more extreme or novel content may experience stronger withdrawal symptoms as their brains readjust to normal stimulation levels.
Age of First Exposure
Individuals who began using pornography at younger ages often face more challenging withdrawal periods. Early exposure during critical brain development phases can create deeper neural pathways that require more time and effort to change.
Co-occurring Mental Health Conditions
Pre-existing mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, or other addictive disorders can complicate the withdrawal process. These conditions may become more apparent during withdrawal and require additional professional support.
Social Support and Environmental Factors
Strong social support networks and healthy environmental factors can significantly reduce withdrawal severity. Conversely, isolation, relationship stress, or environments with easy access to triggers may intensify symptoms.
Overall Physical and Mental Health
Your general health status, including sleep quality, nutrition, exercise habits, and stress levels, influences how well your body can cope with the withdrawal process. Those in better overall health often experience milder symptoms and faster recovery.
Managing Withdrawal SymptomsSuccessfully navigating pornography withdrawal requires a comprehensive approach that addresses both the immediate symptoms and the underlying factors that contributed to the addiction.
Establishing Healthy Daily Routines
Creating structure in your daily life provides stability during the emotional turbulence of withdrawal. Establish consistent sleep and wake times, regular meal schedules, and planned activities that reduce idle time when cravings might intensify. Maintaining a predictable routine helps your brain recalibrate and adapt to the absence of constant dopamine spikes from pornography use. It also fosters a sense of control and accomplishment, which is vital for mental health during recovery.
In addition to structuring your day, setting small, achievable goals can provide motivation and a sense of progress. These goals might include completing a task, engaging in a hobby, or practicing a relaxation technique. Celebrating these small victories reinforces positive behavior and helps counter feelings of discouragement that may arise during withdrawal.
Another important aspect is managing triggers by proactively planning your day. Identify times or situations when you are most vulnerable to cravings and fill those periods with purposeful activities. This can include social interactions, physical exercise, or creative pursuits. Keeping busy not only distracts from urges but also promotes the development of new, healthy habits that replace old compulsive patterns.
Finally, self-compassion plays a crucial role in maintaining structure. Recognize that withdrawal symptoms are part of your brain’s healing process and that setbacks are common. Allow yourself grace and patience as you navigate these changes, understanding that consistency over time leads to lasting recovery.
Physical Exercise and Movement
Regular physical activity is one of the most effective strategies for managing withdrawal symptoms. Exercise naturally boosts endorphin production, improves mood, reduces stress, and provides a healthy outlet for restless energy. Even moderate activities like walking or stretching can provide significant benefits.
Mindfulness and Stress Reduction Techniques
Practicing mindfulness meditation, deep breathing exercises, and progressive muscle relaxation can help manage anxiety and emotional volatility. These techniques provide healthy coping mechanisms for stress without relying on compulsive behaviors.
Nutritional Support
Eating nutritious foods supports brain health during the recovery process. Focus on whole foods, adequate protein, healthy fats, and complex carbohydrates while avoiding excessive caffeine, sugar, and processed foods that can worsen mood swings and energy crashes.
Building Support Networks
Connecting with trusted friends, family members, or support groups provides crucial emotional support during challenging moments. Many people find value in online communities, online therapy, or 12-step programs specifically designed for sex addiction or compulsive sexual behavior disorder.
Productive Activity Replacement
Identifying meaningful activities to replace the time previously spent watching pornography helps fill the void and provides a sense of accomplishment. Consider learning new skills, pursuing hobbies, volunteering, or engaging in creative pursuits.
Trigger Avoidance and Environmental Modifications
Identifying and avoiding triggers is essential for preventing relapse. This might involve installing website blockers, avoiding certain locations or times of day when urges are strongest, and modifying your living space to reduce temptation.
Creating a Recovery PlanCreating your personalized recovery plan isn’t just another step—it’s a compassionate act of self-care that honors your courage to heal from porn addiction and navigate withdrawal with grace. Your unique journey deserves a thoughtful roadmap that understands your individual challenges and celebrates your commitment to growth. As you begin, we encourage you to gently explore your personal triggers with curiosity rather than judgment, developing nurturing strategies to support yourself through cravings—whether that’s discovering fulfilling alternative activities that bring you joy, embracing mindfulness practices that ground you in the present moment, or reaching out to your support network who truly understands your path.
Your emotional landscape during recovery deserves the same specialized attention and care that our expert therapists provide their clients every day. Learning to honor and process your feelings—through gentle techniques like conscious breathing, reflective journaling, or meaningful conversations with trusted friends—empowers you to navigate difficult emotions without returning to old patterns. This healing journey often includes the tender work of rebuilding relationships and restoring trust with your loved ones, recognizing that addiction can strain even our most cherished connections, but that repair and deeper intimacy are absolutely possible.
Seeking professional guidance through therapy or counseling represents a profound investment in your wellbeing and future—one that provides you with specialized, personalized support tailored to your unique needs and circumstances. An experienced mental health professional becomes your ally in addressing underlying concerns, developing healthy coping strategies that truly serve you, and celebrating your progress along the way. Embracing nurturing habits like regular movement, nourishing nutrition, and restorative sleep creates a foundation of resilience that supports your entire being through this transformation. Finally, connecting with support groups or online communities offers you the gift of understanding voices—people who truly comprehend your experiences and can offer genuine encouragement as you continue growing into the person you’re meant to become.
When to Seek Professional HelpWhile many people successfully navigate pornography withdrawal independently, professional support can be invaluable, especially in certain circumstances.
Anyone addicted to pornography will benefit from counseling, especially if you have multiple failed attempts to quit pornography. Professional therapists who specialize in behavioral addictions can provide personalized strategies, help address underlying issues, and offer ongoing support throughout the recovery process. In addition to counseling, joining a support group focused on pornography recovery can provide invaluable community-based support. A comprehensive treatment program should include addressing the underlying drivers of addiction, often rooted in challenges around attachment and trauma.
Persistent or Worsening SymptomsIf withdrawal symptoms persist beyond 4-6 weeks without improvement, or if they worsen over time, professional intervention becomes even more essential. Extended symptoms may indicate underlying mental health conditions that require specialized treatment.
Severe Depression or AnxietyWhen withdrawal symptoms significantly interfere with your ability to function at work, school, or in relationships, professional help is crucial. Severe depression, persistent anxiety, or panic attacks may require therapeutic intervention or medication management.
Suicidal Thoughts or Self-HarmAny thoughts of suicide or self-harm during withdrawal represent a mental health emergency requiring immediate professional attention. Don’t hesitate to contact emergency services or a mental health crisis line if you experience these symptoms.
Co-occurring Addictive BehaviorsIf you’re struggling with substance abuse, gambling, or other compulsive behaviors alongside pornography addiction, professional treatment becomes even more important. These complex presentations often require specialized, integrated treatment approaches.
Relationship and Sexual DysfunctionWhen pornography withdrawal significantly impacts your intimate relationships or sexual functioning doesn’t improve after several months, couples therapy or sex therapy may be beneficial. These specialized approaches can help restore healthy sexual relationships and communication patterns.
Professional treatment options include individual therapy, group therapy, specialized addiction counseling, and in some cases, medication management for co-occurring mental health conditions. Our therapists offer online sessions, making quality care more accessible and convenient for those with busy lives.
Frequently Asked QuestionsHow long do pornography withdrawal symptoms typically last?Most people experience the worst symptoms within the first 1-2 weeks, with gradual improvement over 4-8 weeks. However, some individuals may have symptoms that last several months, especially if they had a severe addiction or underlying mental health conditions. The timeline varies significantly based on factors like duration of use, frequency, age of first exposure, and overall health status.
Are pornography withdrawal symptoms dangerous?Unlike alcohol or drug withdrawal, pornography withdrawal is not physically dangerous or life-threatening. However, the psychological symptoms can be intense and may require professional support, especially if someone experiences severe depression or suicidal thoughts. While the symptoms are uncomfortable, they represent your brain’s natural healing process and will improve with time and proper support.
Can withdrawal symptoms come back after they’ve improved?Yes, some people experience “waves” of withdrawal symptoms that can return weeks or even months later, often triggered by stress, relationship problems, or exposure to pornographic content. This phenomenon is normal and typically becomes less frequent over time. These recurring symptoms don’t indicate failure but rather represent your brain’s ongoing adaptation process.
Do women experience different withdrawal symptoms than men?While the core symptoms are similar, women may experience more emotional and relationship-focused symptoms during withdrawal, while men often report more sexual dysfunction like “flatlining” (temporary loss of sexual desire). Both genders can experience the full range of psychological and physical symptoms, though individual presentations vary widely regardless of gender.
Is it normal to have no withdrawal symptoms when stopping pornography?Yes, not everyone experiences withdrawal symptoms when stopping pornography use. This typically occurs in people who used pornography occasionally rather than compulsively, or who didn’t develop a psychological dependence on it for emotional regulation or stress relief. The absence of withdrawal symptoms doesn’t minimize the positive benefits of stopping pornography use.
If you’re struggling with pornography addiction, you’re not alone in wondering how long the road to recovery might be. The journey to break free from compulsive pornography use is deeply personal, but understanding what to expect can provide hope and direction during what may feel like an overwhelming time.
Recovery from porn addiction is absolutely possible with proper commitment, support, and professional guidance. While there’s no universal timeline that applies to everyone, research and clinical experience show that meaningful progress often begins within the first few months of treatment, with complete recovery typically unfolding over one to two years or more.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the realistic timelines for porn addiction recovery, the stages you can expect to navigate, and the factors that influence how quickly you can heal. Most importantly, we’ll discuss how professional counseling can significantly accelerate your recovery process and provide the support you need to reclaim your life.
https://youtu.be/eTEl270oQEE?si=ahbpJp9RvADNEZah
Key TakeawaysUnderstanding what lies ahead in your porn addiction recovery journey can help set realistic expectations and maintain hope during challenging moments. Here are the essential points to remember:
- Recovery from porn addiction is possible with proper commitment, support, and professional guidance from mental health professionals who specialize in sexual addiction
- The recovery timeline varies from 3-6 months for initial progress to 2+ years for complete recovery, depending on individual circumstances and addiction severity
- Sobriety is often achieved within the first month or two of counseling, though this represents just the beginning of the healing process
- Treatment involves multiple approaches including therapy, support groups, lifestyle changes, and addressing underlying mental health issues that may drive porn addiction
- Relapse is not uncommon and should be viewed as part of the recovery process, not failure – most relapses occur within the first year
- Building a strong support system and developing healthy coping mechanisms and attachments are crucial for long-term success in overcoming pornography addiction
Understanding Porn Addiction RecoveryPorn addiction recovery involves breaking free from compulsive pornography consumption that has begun to negatively impact your mental health, relationships, and daily functioning. While pornography addiction isn’t yet formally recognized in the DSM-5, many mental health professionals treat it as a behavioral addiction similar to gambling or gaming disorders.
How Pornography Affects Your BrainUnderstanding the neurobiological basis of porn addiction can help reduce shame and provide hope for healing. When you watch pornography, your brain releases dopamine in reward pathways similar to those activated by substance abuse. This creates a powerful reinforcement cycle that can lead to compulsive behavior over time.
Repeated pornography consumption causes neurological adaptations, particularly desensitization, meaning you may require more frequent or intense stimulation to achieve the same level of excitement. What begins as pleasure-seeking behavior can evolve into compulsive porn use performed to avoid discomfort rather than gain enjoyment.
Many former porn addicts report experiencing emotional numbing, difficulty finding pleasure in ordinary activities, and persistent, intrusive cravings. The good news is that these brain changes are not permanent – with proper treatment and time, your neural pathways can heal and return to healthier patterns.
The Scope of the ProblemYou’re far from alone in this struggle. While precise statistics are challenging to obtain due to variations in self-reporting, available data suggest that a significant portion of adults struggle with problematic pornography use. Estimates range from 2% to 8% for clinical-level problematic use, but self-identified problematic use in surveys can reach up to 50% of adults reporting some level of difficulty controlling their porn use or experiencing negative consequences.
The shame and stigma surrounding sexual addiction often prevent people from seeking help, which can worsen the addiction and delay recovery. Remember that seeking professional support is a sign of strength, not weakness.
Recovery as a Gradual ProcessWhile periods of sobriety from watching porn may be achieved relatively quickly, lasting recovery requires sustained, multi-layered effort involving self-awareness, therapy, and changes in emotional and relational strategies. Many clients cycle through periods of abstinence and porn addiction relapse before achieving long-term recovery – this is completely normal and doesn’t indicate failure.
Recovery involves much more than simply stopping porn use. It includes developing healthy coping mechanisms, addressing underlying mental health disorders, rebuilding damaged relationships, and creating a fulfilling life that doesn’t rely on addictive behaviors for emotional regulation.
Timelines We Typically See In Our Counseling AgencyBased on extensive clinical experience with porn addiction counseling, recovery timelines vary significantly depending on the severity of the addiction and individual circumstances. Here’s what we typically observe:
| Addiction Severity | Treatment Duration | Typical Outcomes | | --- | --- | --- | | Mild Addiction | 8-12 weekly sessions | Significant progress in 2-3 months | | Moderate Addiction | 3-6 months weekly sessions | Substantial change and improved control | | Serious Addiction | 6-12 months weekly sessions | Major life improvements and stable recovery | | Very Serious/Sex Addiction | 2+ years ongoing support | Long-term recovery with maintenance |
Mild Addiction RecoveryClients with less entrenched patterns of compulsive porn use often achieve significant progress in 8 to 12 weekly counseling sessions, roughly 2-3 months. These cases typically involve decreased but not completely eliminated control over pornography consumption, with fewer structural life consequences.
People in this category may have recognized their problem early and sought help before the addiction severely impacted their relationships or daily functioning. They often respond well to cognitive behavioral therapy and basic coping strategies.
Moderate Addiction RecoveryThe majority of clients seeking porn addiction recovery fall into the moderate category, where 3 to 6 months of weekly counseling is recommended for substantial change. This period allows for rewiring ingrained habits, developing effective coping strategies, and exploring triggers and emotional roots of the addictive behavior.
During this timeframe, clients work on addressing underlying mental health issues that may contribute to their porn use, such as anxiety, depression, or trauma. They also begin rebuilding trust in relationships and developing healthier patterns of intimacy and sexual expression.
Serious Addiction RecoveryFor those experiencing severe consequences from their pornography use and/or compulsive behavior with intrusive thoughts about pornographic material, 6 to 12 months of regular counseling is typical. The recovery process includes managing withdrawal symptoms, emotional volatility, addressing comorbid mental health disorders, and often couples or family therapy to repair relationship damage.
Clients in this category may have escalated to more extreme porn content, experienced significant relationship breakdowns, or developed other mental health symptoms alongside porn addiction. Recovery often requires intensive therapeutic work and may include group therapy or specialized treatment programs.
Very Serious Addiction RecoveryIn the most severe cases – such as when porn addiction behaviors overlap with other compulsive sexual activities or have continued for many years – 2+ years of counseling is often needed. Recovery becomes a long-term process similar in scope to recovery from substance use disorders.
These cases often involve complex trauma histories, multiple addictive behaviors, or severe relationship and life consequences. Recovery requires comprehensive treatment addressing not just the pornography use but the underlying emotional wounds and life circumstances that fostered its development.
Individual Variation in RecoveryIt’s crucial to understand that recovery timelines are highly individualized. Your motivation, life context, access to support, willingness to engage with difficult emotional work, and presence of other mental health disorders all impact the pace and completeness of your recovery from porn addiction.
Some people may achieve stable recovery more quickly than these averages, while others may need additional time and support. The key is persistence and working with qualified mental health professionals who can tailor treatment to your specific needs and circumstances.
Initial Recovery Stages (0-8 months)The early stages of porn addiction recovery are often the most challenging but also the most crucial for establishing a foundation for long-term healing. Understanding what to expect can help you navigate these difficult months with greater confidence and hope.
Crisis/Decision Stage (0-3 months)This period typically begins with recognition of crisis, whether due to personal distress or a catalyzing external event such as relationship breakdown, job repercussions, or health consequences. During this stage, you make the crucial commitment to change and begin taking concrete steps to address your pornography addiction.
The crisis/decision stage is marked by high motivation but also intense vulnerability. You may experience acute cravings, anxiety, and preoccupation with pornographic material. This is when you need the highest level of therapeutic and social support to maintain your commitment to recovery.
Common interventions during this stage include:
- Seeking professional counseling specialized in sexual addiction
- Installing digital restriction tools to limit access to pornographic content
- Joining support groups for accountability and peer support
- Informing trusted friends or family members about your recovery goals
- Developing immediate coping strategies for managing cravings
Many people successfully stop watching porn during this initial phase, often within the first month or two of beginning serious recovery efforts. However, it’s important to understand that achieving sobriety is just the first step in a longer healing process.
Shock Stage (1-8 months)As your neurochemical system adjusts to the absence of high-frequency pornography-induced stimulation, you may experience porn withdrawal symptoms similar to those seen in substance abuse recovery. This “shock stage” can be particularly challenging as your brain and body adapt to functioning without the dopamine surges provided by compulsive porn use.
Common porn addiction withdrawal symptoms during this period include:
- Irritability and mood swings
- Anxiety and restlessness
- Insomnia and sleep disturbances
- Fatigue and low energy
- Loss of interest in previously enjoyed activities
- Difficulty concentrating
- Strong cravings for pornographic material
- Emotional lability – sudden surges of anger, sadness, or grief
Professional therapy is critical during this stage to provide emotional containment, help you understand and manage these symptoms, and begin addressing the underlying issues that contributed to your addiction. Many people find that individual counseling combined with group therapy or support groups provides the comprehensive support needed during this challenging time.
It’s important to remember that these withdrawal symptoms are temporary and indicate that your brain is beginning to heal from the effects of compulsive pornography use. Working with a mental health professional who understands addiction recovery can help you develop effective strategies for managing these symptoms while building a foundation for long-term recovery.
Long-term Recovery Stages (6 months – 2+ years)The later stages of porn addiction recovery involve deeper psychological and behavioral changes that create lasting transformation. While the initial stages focus on achieving sobriety and managing acute symptoms, long-term recovery is about rebuilding your life and relationships in healthier ways.
Grief Stage (Around 6 months)Around the six-month mark in your porn addiction recovery journey, you may enter what many therapists call the “grief stage.” During this phase, you begin processing deeper pain and grieving the role that pornography played as a coping mechanism in your life.
This stage often involves confronting root causes of your addiction, such as childhood trauma, attachment wounds, ongoing loneliness, or other underlying mental health issues. While this can be emotionally challenging, it represents crucial progress in your healing journey.
Common experiences during the grief stage include:
- Sadness about time and relationships lost to addiction
- Anger about the impact of pornography on your life
- Fear about facing life without your primary coping mechanism
- Grief over childhood experiences that contributed to your addiction
- Anxiety about building authentic intimate relationships
Therapy during this stage focuses on deeper emotional regulation, processing trauma or painful experiences, and developing self-acceptance and self-compassion. Many people find that this stage, while difficult, leads to significant breakthroughs in understanding themselves and their addiction patterns.
Repair Stage (18-36 months)The repair stage represents a significant shift in focus from managing addiction symptoms to actively building healthy habits and re-integrating into balanced living. This period often involves substantial relationship work, redefining intimacy, and developing a sense of meaning and purpose beyond avoiding pornography.
Key areas of focus during the repair stage include:
- Rebuilding trust in damaged relationships
- Developing healthy patterns of sexual intimacy
- Creating meaningful life goals and pursuing personal growth
- Establishing sustainable routines and lifestyle habits
- Continuing to address any ongoing mental health symptoms
- Building a strong support network of healthy relationships
This stage can last anywhere from 18 months to three years, as rebuilding relationships and establishing new life patterns takes significant time and effort. Many people find that couples therapy or family therapy becomes particularly important during this phase if their addiction has impacted their closest relationships.
The repair stage is often when former porn addicts begin to experience the full benefits of their recovery efforts – improved relationships, better mental health, increased self-esteem, and a greater sense of purpose and fulfillment in life.
Growth Stage (2+ years)With compulsive urges largely controlled and healthy life patterns established, the growth stage focuses on personal development, mature self-understanding, and continued improvement in relationships. While the risk of relapse significantly decreases after two years of sustained recovery, ongoing vigilance and occasional check-ins with therapists or support groups often continue on a maintenance basis.
During the growth stage, many people report:
- Significantly improved intimate relationships and sex life
- Better overall mental health and emotional regulation
- Increased confidence and self-esteem
- Greater sense of purpose and life satisfaction
- Ability to help others struggling with similar issues
- Continued personal growth and development
Research suggests that the risk of porn addiction relapse sharply declines after two years of sustained recovery, though it doesn’t disappear entirely. Many people maintain ongoing connections with support groups or periodic therapy sessions as a form of “maintenance” to protect their recovery.
Understanding Relapse StatisticsIt’s crucial to understand that relapse is extremely common in behavioral addictions, particularly in the first year of recovery. Studies indicate that up to 60-75% of people recovering from porn addiction experience at least one relapse episode within the first year.
However, experiencing a relapse doesn’t mean you’ve failed or that recovery is impossible. Most people who eventually achieve long-term recovery from pornography addiction experience one or more relapses during their journey. The key is learning from these experiences and quickly returning to your recovery efforts with the support of mental health professionals.
Research consistently shows that people who persist through relapses and continue working on their recovery have much better long-term outcomes than those who give up after initial setbacks.
Factors That Influence Recovery Success Or Therapy DurationYour individual porn addiction recovery journey will be influenced by numerous personal, environmental, and circumstantial factors. Understanding these variables can help you and your treatment team develop a more effective and realistic recovery plan.
Circumstances Behind the AddictionThe underlying factors that contributed to your pornography addiction significantly impact both the complexity and duration of your recovery process.
Trauma and Childhood ExperiencesA substantial number of individuals with porn addiction report histories of childhood abuse, neglect, or trauma. These experiences often complicate and typically prolong the recovery process, as effective treatment must address not only the addictive behavior but also the emotional and relational wounds that fostered its development.
If your pornography use began as a way to cope with traumatic experiences, sexual abuse, or neglectful caregiving, your recovery may require specialized trauma-informed therapy approaches. This often extends the treatment timeline but leads to more comprehensive healing that addresses root causes rather than just symptoms.
Co-Occurring Mental Health DisordersHigh rates of comorbidity exist between porn addiction and other mental health disorders, including depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and ADHD. When these conditions are present but untreated, they significantly delay recovery and increase the risk of porn addiction relapse.
Comprehensive treatment for pornography addiction often includes addressing these co-occurring mental health issues through therapy, and sometimes medication when appropriate. Mental health professionals who specialize in addiction understand the complex interplay between these conditions and can develop integrated treatment approaches.
Relationship Issues and Attachment PatternsMarital conflict, poor attachment patterns, and lack of healthy intimacy often co-exist with compulsive porn use. Recovery is typically accelerated when partners are involved in counseling, though repairing trust and rebuilding intimate relationships can take years and may not always be possible, depending on the extent of harm caused by the addiction.
People with secure attachment styles and strong relationship skills often recover more quickly than those with histories of relationship difficulties or insecure attachment patterns. However, recovery itself can help improve your capacity for healthy relationships over time.
Current Life StressorsHigh stress levels, lack of social support, and environmental instability (such as job loss, divorce, or bereavement) correlate with longer or more complex recovery processes. While you can’t always control external stressors, developing healthy stress management techniques becomes a crucial part of recovery.
Level of Porn Involvement and SeverityThe characteristics of your pornography use significantly influence your recovery timeline and the intensity of treatment needed.
Frequency and Duration of UsePeople who watch pornography multiple times daily or have been using it compulsively for many years typically require longer recovery periods than those with less frequent use patterns. The brain changes associated with long-term, high-frequency use take more time to heal and may require more intensive therapeutic intervention.
Escalation to Extreme ContentClients who have escalated to more frequent, high-intensity, or extreme forms of pornography – including potentially illegal content – generally have longer and more complex recovery journeys. This escalation pattern reflects increased neurological adaptation and often indicates more severe underlying emotional or psychological issues.
Financial and Life ConsequencesSome people develop financial problems related to their pornography use, such as spending significant money on paid sites, webcams, or related activities. While these consequences can increase motivation for recovery, they also introduce additional stress and shame that can paradoxically hinder progress.
The severity of life consequences – including job loss, relationship breakdown, legal issues, or health problems – often correlates with both addiction severity and recovery complexity.
Impact on Relationships and IntimacyThe deeper the erosion of trust, emotional intimacy, and communication in your relationships, the longer and more complex the repair process becomes. Some relationships can be rebuilt through dedicated effort and couples therapy, while others may not survive the recovery process.
Many people find that their sex life and capacity for intimate relationships significantly improves during recovery, though this process often takes considerable time and therapeutic work.
Commitment Level and Willingness to ChangeYour internal motivation and readiness for change are among the most important predictors of recovery success.
Internal vs. External MotivationRecovery efforts rooted in internal motivation – such as personal values, life goals, and genuine desire for change – typically produce longer-term success than those driven exclusively by external pressure, such as ultimatums from partners or employers.
While external consequences can provide initial motivation to seek help, lasting recovery requires developing internal reasons for change and commitment to the often difficult process of personal growth and behavioral change.
Willingness to Try New ApproachesMany people attempt to quit watching porn multiple times before seeking professional help. Those who are willing to try new recovery strategies – rather than simply repeating previously unsuccessful attempts like “white-knuckling” without addressing underlying triggers – tend to achieve better outcomes.
Effective recovery often requires lifestyle changes, new coping mechanisms, and addressing underlying emotional issues that contributed to the addictive behavior. Willingness to engage in this broader change process is crucial for long-term success.
Readiness for Difficult Emotional WorkRecovery from pornography addiction involves confronting uncomfortable emotions, difficult memories, and challenging relationship dynamics. People who are prepared for this emotional work and willing to persist through difficult periods typically achieve better outcomes than those seeking quick fixes.
The difference between wanting to quit and being willing to do the necessary work for lasting change is significant and often determines the ultimate success of recovery efforts.
Quality of Support SystemYour support network plays a crucial role in both the speed and sustainability of your recovery from porn addiction.
Professional Support TeamWorking with mental health professionals who specialize in sexual addiction and understand the complexities of behavioral addictions significantly improves recovery outcomes. This may include individual therapists, group therapy facilitators, psychiatrists for medication management if needed, and couples therapists if relationship repair is necessary.
The quality and specialization of your professional support often correlates directly with recovery success rates and reduced relapse risk.
Family and Social SupportHaving trusted family members, friends, or mentors who understand your recovery goals and can provide ongoing encouragement and accountability dramatically improves long-term outcomes. However, it’s important that these support people are educated about addiction and recovery to provide helpful rather than inadvertently harmful support.
Social isolation and shame are major drivers of relapse. People who recover successfully often have some combination of professional support and personal relationships that provide both accountability and genuine emotional support.
Peer Support and Recovery CommunitiesMany people find significant benefit from peer support through groups like Sex Addicts Anonymous, SMART Recovery, or online recovery communities. These groups provide validation, shared experience, and ongoing accountability that can be particularly helpful during challenging periods.
Support groups can be especially valuable for reducing the shame and isolation that often accompany sexual addiction, helping you realize that you’re not alone in your struggles and that recovery is possible.
Environmental FactorsYour living situation, work environment, and daily routines all influence your recovery process. People who can modify their environment to reduce triggers and increase support for healthy behaviors often experience faster progress.
This might include changes like using internet filtering software, modifying living arrangements, changing daily routines that were associated with pornography use, or finding new social activities that support your recovery goals.
FAQCan you fully recover from porn addiction?Yes, full recovery from pornography addiction is absolutely possible with proper treatment, commitment, and support. Recovery is a gradual process that may take months to years, but thousands of people have successfully overcome porn addiction and rebuilt healthy relationships and fulfilling lives.
Recovery doesn’t just mean stopping pornography use – it involves developing healthy coping mechanisms, addressing underlying mental health issues, rebuilding damaged relationships, and creating a life that provides genuine fulfillment and meaning. Many former porn addicts report that their lives become significantly better than they were even before their addiction began.
Working with mental health professionals who specialize in sexual addiction greatly improves your chances of achieving lasting recovery. With proper support and commitment to the process, you can break free from compulsive pornography use and develop the capacity for healthy intimate relationships and overall well being.
How long does porn addiction recovery take?Porn addiction recovery timelines vary widely from 3-6 months for initial progress to 2+ years for complete recovery. The exact duration depends on factors like addiction severity, presence of underlying mental health disorders, quality of support system, and commitment to treatment.
Most people achieve initial sobriety (stopping pornography use) within the first month or two of beginning serious recovery efforts with professional support. However, deeper healing and lifestyle changes typically unfold over much longer periods.
Based on clinical experience, mild cases often see significant progress in 2-3 months, moderate cases require 3-6 months of weekly counseling, serious cases need 6-12 months of intensive treatment, and very severe cases may require 2+ years of ongoing therapeutic support.
Remember that recovery is not a linear process, and experiencing setbacks doesn’t mean you’re failing. Most people who achieve long-term recovery experience one or more relapses during their journey, particularly in the first year.
What are the first steps to recovering from porn addiction?The first steps to recover from porn addiction include acknowledging the problem, seeking professional help from a mental health professional who specializes in addiction, removing immediate access to pornographic material, and building a support system of trusted individuals.
Start by honestly assessing the impact of pornography use on your life, relationships, and mental health. This self-recognition is often the catalyst for meaningful change. Then, seek professional help from a therapist experienced in treating sexual addiction and behavioral addictions.
Practical first steps include installing website blocking software, informing trusted friends or family members about your recovery goals for accountability, and removing pornographic materials from your environment. Many people also benefit from joining support groups or online recovery communities.
Most importantly, approach your recovery with self-compassion rather than shame. Pornography addiction is a legitimate mental health issue that responds well to proper treatment, not a moral failing that requires punishment.
Is relapse normal during porn addiction recovery?Yes, porn addiction relapse is extremely common and should be viewed as part of the recovery process rather than failure. Research indicates that 60-75% of people recovering from behavioral addictions experience at least one relapse episode within the first year, with most relapses occurring in the early months of recovery.
Relapse doesn’t mean you’re weak or that recovery is impossible – it simply indicates that you need to adjust your recovery approach or strengthen your support system. Many people who eventually achieve long-term recovery experience multiple relapses during their journey.
The key is having a relapse prevention plan that includes immediate steps to take if you return to pornography use, such as contacting your therapist or sponsor, attending additional support group meetings, and recommitting to your recovery goals without engaging in self-criticism or shame.
Learning from relapse experiences can actually strengthen your long-term recovery by helping you identify triggers, vulnerable situations, and areas where you need additional support or skill development.
What withdrawal symptoms can I expect when quitting porn?Common porn withdrawal symptoms include anxiety, irritability, mood swings, intense cravings for pornographic material, fatigue, sleep disturbances, difficulty concentrating, and emotional volatility. These symptoms typically peak within the first few weeks of stopping pornography use and gradually subside with proper support.
Physical symptoms may include headaches, muscle tension, restlessness, and changes in appetite or sleep patterns. Emotional symptoms often include increased anxiety, depression, anger, or grief as your brain adjusts to functioning without the dopamine surges provided by compulsive porn use.
The intensity and duration of withdrawal symptoms vary based on factors like how long and frequently you used pornography, your overall mental health, and the quality of support you receive during early recovery. Most acute symptoms improve significantly within 1-2 months, though some people experience longer adjustment periods.
Working with a mental health professional during this period can help you manage withdrawal symptoms more effectively and develop healthy coping strategies to replace pornography use. Remember that these symptoms are temporary and indicate that your brain is beginning to heal from the effects of addiction.
ConclusionRecovery from pornography addiction is not just possible—it’s a journey that thousands have successfully completed with proper support and professional guidance. While the path may seem daunting, understanding what to expect can provide hope and direction during challenging times.
The timeline for porn addiction recovery varies significantly among individuals, typically ranging from several months for initial progress to two or more years for complete transformation. What matters most is not the speed of your recovery, but your commitment to the process and willingness to seek appropriate help along the way.
Remember that experiencing setbacks doesn’t mean failure – porn addiction relapse is a normal part of the recovery process for most people. Each challenge provides an opportunity to strengthen your recovery skills and deepen your understanding of the patterns that led to your addiction.
Professional counseling can dramatically accelerate your recovery process by providing specialized expertise, emotional support, and evidence-based treatment approaches tailored to your specific needs. Mental health professionals who understand sexual addiction can help you navigate the complex emotional, relational, and psychological aspects of recovery while developing sustainable strategies for long-term success.
Your porn addiction recovery journey is ultimately about much more than simply stopping pornography use – it’s about reclaiming your life, rebuilding healthy relationships, and developing the capacity for genuine intimacy and fulfillment. With commitment, proper support, and professional guidance, you can break free from the cycle of compulsive pornography use and create the healthy, meaningful life you deserve.
If you’re ready to begin your recovery journey, reach out to a mental health professional who specializes in addiction treatment. Taking that first step toward getting help is often the most difficult part, but it’s also the beginning of genuine healing and transformation.
What if I told you that the people who seem the most controlling are often the ones who feel the most out of control on the inside? This paradox is a profound truth frequently encountered in couple’s counseling. That constant need your spouse might have to check who you’re texting, manage your schedule, or question your spending—it’s almost never really about you. Instead, it’s a coping mechanism, a flawed attempt to manage a storm of anxiety, deep-seated fears, or even past trauma raging inside them. Understanding this distinction is crucial because the behaviors we label as controlling can be complex, and the defining line between a frustrating dynamic and abusive control often comes down to the presence of fear and power.
Ask yourself: Does your spouse’s controlling behavior seem to stem from their own internal anxiety or fear? Or does it feel like a deliberate tactic to isolate you and maintain power over you? The core difference lies in your emotional experience—are you feeling frustrated, or are you genuinely afraid of your partner’s reaction? If fear, intimidation, or isolation are present, you may be facing coercive control, a serious form of domestic violence. In such cases, your safety is absolutely paramount, and connecting with resources like the National Domestic Violence Hotline is essential. If you are in danger, it is absolutely necessary to prioritize your safety and seek help immediately. However, if you feel fundamentally safe yet struggle with frustration due to your partner’s need to control, then this article is here to support you in navigating that challenge.
https://youtu.be/Ip3HCn9SGP0?si=6D6UwPFC16UrfvHJ
Part 1: Introduction – The Frustration is RealWhen your spouse exhibits controlling behavior, it can feel overwhelming and deeply frustrating. You might find yourself constantly questioned about where you are, who you’re with, or how you spend your time. Perhaps your partner micromanages the family finances down to the last dollar or insists on approving every plan you make with your friends. Sometimes, what initially seem like “helpful suggestions” turn into directives about how you should dress, what you should eat, or even how to parent your children. It’s important to remember that a controlling person can take many forms—some may be overtly domineering, while others may use subtle or manipulative tactics. Not all controlling people act the same way.
Such controlling behavior can leave you feeling not trusted, infantilized, and filled with resentment. Many individuals have felt isolated, anxious, or powerless in response to a controlling person’s actions. These feelings are real and significant. At the same time, reframing controlling behavior as an attempt by the controlling spouse to manage internal chaos or emotional pain can help you discern how to navigate this problem in your relationship. Recognizing this can help you develop empathy for your partner, even when their behavior feels counterproductive.
In this article, we will explore the root causes behind controlling behavior, develop compassion for the spouse who struggles with it, and provide practical tools for the other spouse to respond with strength, understanding, and love. This approach aims to foster a healthier connection within your marriage or relationship.
Part 2: The “Why” Behind the “What” – Unpacking the RootsTo effectively address controlling behavior, it’s essential to understand what lies beneath it. Typically, it’s not about a desire to dominate but rather a flawed strategy to cope with deep fears and anxieties. Many controlling behaviors are learned from parents or family dynamics, especially when parents themselves were authoritative or maintained strict control within the household. As humans, there is a natural tendency to seek control or security in relationships, which can sometimes lead to unhealthy patterns. Several factors often contribute to a controlling spouse’s behavior, including past traumas or betrayals that happened earlier in life and continue to influence current actions and emotional responses.
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Anxiety & FearFor many controlling people, control is a way to manage an unpredictable and chaotic internal world. When anxiety is high, predictability feels like safety. A controlling spouse may expect certain behaviors or outcomes from their partner, and when these expectations are unmet, their anxiety can increase, leading to more controlling behaviors. This need to control can manifest as constant criticism, questioning, or even the silent treatment when things don’t go as expected.
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Unresolved Trauma or Past BetrayalPast traumas or betrayals, whether in the current relationship or earlier in life, can leave a person’s nervous system constantly on alert. For example, a husband whose father was unfaithful might compulsively check his wife’s phone—not out of distrust toward her personally, but out of fear of being blindsided again. This behavior can deeply affect the wife, making her feel distrusted, controlled, and emotionally hurt, undermining her sense of autonomy and respect within the marriage. This trauma-driven controlling behavior is a misguided attempt to protect oneself from future pain.
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PerfectionismPerfectionism often acts as a defense mechanism against shame or failure. The belief is that if every detail is controlled—from how the house is kept clean to how the family spends money or how a partner manages their tasks—disaster and judgment can be avoided. This can lead to expectations that become unfair within the marriage and family, causing tension and conflict.
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Low Self-Esteem & Relational InsecurityA core wound such as “I’m not good enough” or “I’m unlovable” can drive controlling behavior. The controlling spouse may fear abandonment and try to keep their partner close by controlling their actions. Ironically, this behavior often pushes the partner away, creating a cycle of insecurity and control. This dynamic can affect the entire family, including children, who may sense the tension and feel unsafe.
Wives, in particular, may be especially impacted by controlling dynamics within a marriage, sometimes experiencing challenges related to dependency and loss of identity.
Understanding these factors helps clarify that controlling behavior is often less about a desire to dominate and more about a person’s internal struggle with fear, insecurity, and past wounds.
Part 3: What to Do – Actionable Steps for ConnectionIf you find yourself on the receiving end of controlling behavior, there are healthy ways to respond that foster connection and reduce conflict. Take time to talk openly with your spouse about how certain actions make you feel, and encourage honest dialogue about control issues. These steps emphasize communication, respect, and boundaries.
Suppose you notice a pattern where your partner makes decisions without your input—this could be a sign of control, but it might also be a misunderstanding. In such situations, it’s important to make your point clear when discussing boundaries and needs, so both partners understand each other’s perspectives. Sometimes, a single moment of honest conversation can lead to a shift in understanding and help both of you move toward a more balanced, interdependent relationship. Interdependence in a relationship allows both spouses to meet each other’s needs without feeling controlled, fostering mutual respect and autonomy.
Step 1: Get Curious, Not FuriousInstead of reacting with anger or defensiveness, try shifting your response to one of curiosity. Ask open, gentle questions that invite your spouse to share their feelings and fears. For example:
- “I notice you seem worried when I spend money on my own. Can you tell me what fear comes up for you around our finances?”
- “Help me understand how you feel when I’m out late with my friends.”
This approach encourages open conversation and helps you hear the underlying emotions driving their controlling behavior.
Step 2: Practice DifferentiationDifferentiation is the art of staying connected to your partner while maintaining your own sense of self. It means empathizing with their anxiety without taking responsibility for fixing it. You might say:
- “I hear that you’re scared, and that’s okay. Your fear is yours, and my need for autonomy is mine. Both can exist.”
By setting this emotional line, you protect your well-being while honoring your partner’s feelings. Achieving this balance and interdependence can bring a sense of emotional rest and relief to both partners, allowing each person to feel safe and respected. This balance is key to creating respect and safety in the relationship.
Step 3: Set Loving BoundariesBoundaries are essential for protecting your peace and are different from ultimatums or punishments. Setting clear, loving boundaries communicates your needs while respecting your partner. Even when married, it is important to maintain personal boundaries and autonomy, as boundaries in marriage should not mean giving up your independence. Examples include:
- “I love you, and I also need to make plans with my friends without needing to run it by you first. I’ll make sure our shared calendar is updated.”
- “I’m happy to discuss our shared budget, but I need autonomy over my personal spending allowance without justifying every purchase.”
Creating these boundaries helps both partners understand expectations and reduces the feeling of being controlled or micromanaged.
Part 4: Conclusion & The Path ForwardMoving forward in a relationship with a controlling spouse requires compassion for the underlying reasons behind controlling behaviors and the courage to take action with loving boundaries and differentiation. Successful couples often engage in respectful negotiations rather than demands or sacrifices, creating a foundation of mutual understanding and shared decision-making.
If you recognize these patterns in your marriage or partnership, the next step is seeking guidance. Specialized counseling can provide a safe, non-judgmental space for both spouses to heal and reconnect. Our therapists offer free, confidential consultations to explore how therapy might support your journey toward a healthier, more balanced relationship.
With understanding, respect, and commitment, your relationship can transform from frustration and control to connection, autonomy, and hope. Remember, you are not alone, and help is available to support your safety, well-being, and the unconditional love that can still flourish within your family.
Disclosing an affair is one of the most critical and challenging conversations a husband can have with his wife. When mishandled, this revelation will certainly extend the healing process and possibly could mean the end of the marriage. However, for those who genuinely want to save their relationship and show as much care to their betrayed partner as possible, there are ways to approach this conversation with clarity, care, and respect.
Understanding what to tell your wife about your affair—and how to say it—can make all the difference in whether your marriage survives this painful breach of trust. Infidelity affects about 20-25% of marriages, highlighting how common yet devastating this issue can be.
https://youtu.be/nPlogRdjb18?si=YoPnDPSijA9BcvacThe fear of causing pain and facing the consequences of infidelity is very real and understandable. Yet, how the conversation starts is crucial; it should not be about damage control (i.e., mere self-preservation) or minimization. Instead, it must be rooted in honesty, integrity, and a commitment to building a foundation for possible healing. If your goal is to save your marriage, knowing how to communicate the truth about your affair is the first vital step.
TLDR; being honest and transparent from the beginning is essential for rebuilding trust and demonstrating genuine remorse.
Healing From An Affair Begins With Thoughtful DisclosureThe healing process after an affair is never simple, but it is possible with the right approach and mindset. The reality is that both partners will experience a wide range of emotions, from anger and grief to confusion and hope. Recently found research shows that couples who approach this journey with empathy and a willingness to work through difficult issues are more likely to rebuild trust and potentially create a stronger relationship than before. Rebuilding trust takes time (more than you think!) after infidelity, requiring patience and consistent effort from both partners.
It’s important to keep your heart open and acknowledge the pain that has been caused, both to yourself and your spouse. Seeking out a counselor who understand betrayal trauma can provide the guidance and structure needed to address the complex issues that arise after infidelity. In some cases, the support of a parent or other close family member can also offer comfort and perspective. Many people struggle with the decision of whether to involve friends and family in the recovery process after infidelity, as it can be both a source of support and a potential complication.
Remember: there is no single “right” way to heal. Every couple’s circumstances are unique, and what works for one may not work for another. The key is to remain open, communicate honestly, and be willing to put in the work required to move forward. Healing takes time, but with empathy, the right support, and a commitment to facing reality together, it is possible to start rebuilding your relationship from a new, solid foundation.
Preparing for the Infidelity DisclosurePreparing to tell your wife about your affair requires careful thought and planning. The right environment can make a significant difference—choose a time and place where you both feel comfortable and free from distractions, so you are able to be fully present with the fallout. Before the conversation, take time to write down your thoughts and disclosures. This can help you clarify what you want to say and ensure you don’t fall back on lies or excuses when emotions run high.
It’s also wise to consider seeking the guidance of a counselor for betraying partners before you start this difficult conversation. A professional can help you prepare, offer advice on how to approach this discussion, and provide support as you work through the aftermath together. Being prepared means not only knowing what you want to disclose, but also being ready to listen to your spouse’s feelings and concerns with empathy and validation.
Remember, the goal is not to justify your actions or shift blame, but to take responsibility and start the process of healing. By approaching the conversation with a commitment to honesty, openness, and a willingness to work through the issues, you lay the groundwork for rebuilding trust and moving forward together.
The Temptation to Hide Affair Facts, Minimize, or DishonestyOne of the most common and damaging pitfalls when confessing an affair is the temptation to hide facts or minimize the situation. This often leads to “trickle-truthing,” or what we call “staggered disclosure”, where information is revealed in pieces over time rather than all at once. While it might seem kinder or safer to disclose details slowly, this approach always causes more harm than good.
Each new revelation acts like a fresh emotional betrayal for the betrayed spouse. A wife who experienced this shared her pain: “He has trickle-truthed me endlessly, every iteration of the truth being the ‘final truth’… It sets us back further every time, shatters his credibility even more, and re-traumatizes me.”
Staggered disclosures are experienced as re-betrayals. Each new piece of information is another shattering moment for the betrayed spouse. Hiding the truth in this way does not protect the relationship from harm; in fact, it often deepens the wounds.
The fear of revealing everything often stems from a deep sense of shame. However, the only way to combat shame is through complete vulnerability, which requires surrendering control over the outcome. Once your wife suspects that you are holding back information, she will always wonder what else you might be hiding. This suspicion makes healing and forgiveness far more difficult.
Another betrayed spouse described the destructive impact of staggered disclosure: “First, it was just ‘sexting.’ Then I found out they met for coffee. Months later, I learned it was a full-blown physical affair. Each lie felt like D-Day all over again… The constant lying was more painful than the cheating.” The initial pain caused by infidelity is compounded exponentially when facts are withheld.
Therefore, a thoughtfully handled, honest, and complete disclosure is the only path forward if you want to minimize the trauma caused to your wife.
Don’t Blame or JustifyWhen you confess your affair to your wife, it is essential to avoid blaming her or justifying your actions in any way. While it is true that many affairs happen in marriages that are distressed, emotionally disconnected, or sexless, this is not the time to bring up those issues. Doing so will only add fuel to the fire and deepen her hurt. Trying to convince your wife that your actions were justified will only make her feel more betrayed and intensify her pain.
There will be time later—perhaps in couples therapy or through professional help—to explore the many factors that contributed to the breakdown of your relationship. But during the initial conversation, your sole focus should be on taking full ownership of your choice. No matter how difficult your marriage was, you made a deliberate choice to betray your wife and break your marriage vows. That is the best stance to take at this point in your recovery.
Avoid using pity or self-loathing as a shield either. Expressing overwhelming guilt or focusing on your own pain can subconsciously shift attention away from your wife’s grief. While that may seem productive, it only delays her healing: her hurt, anger, and devastation must have space in this conversation.
What Truth To Disclose About The AffairBuilding a new foundation of honesty requires that your disclosure be factual, thorough, and free of minimization. The goal is to share all the relevant facts—not to provide a graphic or sensationalized account. Here is what we generally recommend you should tell your wife about your affair:
- Who the affair partner was, including how you knew her (the other woman). Revealing this information is crucial to avoid creating suspicion towards other individuals in your life.
- When the affair occurred, including start and end dates.
- Where and when the affair meetups took place.
- The nature of the affair—whether it was emotional, physical, or both.
- How you concealed the affair, owning up to all lies and secrecy.
- How the affair ended, or if it has not.
- Offer access to your emails and other digital communications to demonstrate transparency.
When answering questions, be prepared to respond honestly to anything your wife asked, no matter how difficult (see What Not to Disclose, below).
Your wife may ask you to explain the reasons behind the affair, as she tries to understand why it happened. Be cautious here: most husbands do not know how to provide an explanation without blaming their wife, which is certain to backfire. Inevitably, our experience is that betraying husbands have unrecognized, unmet emotional needs and longings that subconsciously are projected onto the affair partner. But to really articulate those reasons in a thoughtful, non-blaming, responsibility-taking way often takes some good therapy work. You might consider telling your spouse, “I am not sure why. But I will figure it out so that I can become a safe partner for you.”
When Truth About Your Mistake Is Confessed WellOne wife described a disclosure that made recovery possible: “He sat me down and told me the truth—the whole truth—in one go. He didn’t wait for me to find evidence… It was brutal, but it was honest. There were no more secrets waiting around the corner to ambush me. That complete transparency… was the one thing that allowed me to even consider trusting him again.” In her case, she discovered the affair after noticing unusual behavior and finding messages, which made the honesty in his confession even more important.
When you disclose, choose your words carefully. The right word or words can make a difference in how your remorse and sincerity are received. Complete honesty is the only way to dismantle the system of deception that infidelity creates. Be willing to repeat your apologies and reassurances as often as needed to help rebuild trust.
What Not to DiscloseWhile transparency is crucial, certain details are counterproductive and can inflict unnecessary trauma. Avoid sharing a play-by-play of sexual encounters or specific intimate details, such as what the other woman wore. These graphic details create painful mental images and comparisons that hinder healing and deepen emotional wounds.
However, your wife’s physical safety must always be a priority. You need to disclose whether there is any risk of sexually transmitted diseases by sharing the types of sexual contact that occurred and whether protection was used.
If your wife asks for graphic details, it is appropriate to pause and respond with care. It is important to be emotionally present during these conversations, showing that you are fully engaged and attentive to her feelings. You should also strive to be kind in your communication, approaching the discussion with empathy and understanding. You might say: “I want to be completely truthful, but I believe some details will hurt you more than help. I want us to be careful because some memories may fade for me but never for you.” Suggesting that these topics be explored in couples therapy can help both of you navigate what information is truly necessary for healing.
Your task here is to avoid causing further harm while also avoiding it looking like you’re just hiding necessary details.
Dealing with the Affair PartnerAfter disclosing your affair, one of the most important and potentially challenging issues to address is how to deal with the affair partner. In some cases, there is no possibility of accidental contact (e.g., coming across her in the grocery store). In other cases, continued contact with the other woman (e.g., if she is a coworker) can create massive amounts of fear and make it much harder for your spouse to begin healing.
To protect your marriage and show your commitment to rebuilding trust, it’s often necessary to set clear boundaries or end all communication with the affair partner. Sometimes, this necessitates major transitions such as a change in employment.
If you’re unsure how to navigate this complex situation, seeking professional help is highly recommended. A counselor can help you and your spouse work through the emotional fallout, develop a plan for dealing with the affair partner, and address the root causes of the infidelity. Every case is different, so it’s important to consider your unique circumstances and prioritize empathy, honesty, and open communication as you deal with this difficult issue.
Support PlansThe context and timing of this conversation are incredibly important. Avoid disclosing your affair right before a family event or when your wife has other pressing commitments. Instead, choose a quiet time—such as a weekend evening—that allows space for emotional fallout. At the same time, avoid delaying this conversation any longer than you need to: disclosure is always better than discovery.
You should have a plan for your own therapeutic work. Finding a professional therapist to understand your behavior and work through your guilt and mistakes sends a powerful signal of safety and commitment to your wife.
Consider what support your wife will need immediately after the disclosure. Arranging for a trusted friend or family member to be available can help her feel less isolated in her pain. This person should be someone who can be confidential and validate her feelings without pressuring her to forgive or reconcile prematurely. Sharing one’s experience of infidelity with trusted friends can also alleviate feelings of loneliness and shame, providing a sense of connection during a deeply isolating time.
Be prepared for many questions in the days and weeks following your confession. Answer all factual inquiries patiently and honestly. This process helps validate your wife’s reality and rebuild trust.
A Foundation for HealingTrue remorse is not about regretting being caught; it is about being deeply horrified by the pain you caused your spouse. This genuine remorse is the signal that allows a betrayed wife to begin considering forgiveness and rebuilding trust.
One wife on a recovery forum shared what this looked like in practice: “He answered every single one of my questions. He didn’t get defensive… He just answered. He booked his own individual counseling appointment and found a marriage counselor for us that same day. He wrote out a timeline of the affair. He gave me all of his passwords. He knew he had to be an open book, and he didn’t hesitate.”
Disclosing an affair is agonizing, but it is the essential first step toward potential healing. By preparing carefully, taking full ownership, providing all the information your wife needs while avoiding harmful details, and prioritizing her emotional and physical safety, you can create a foundation of honest communication.
While this approach does not guarantee forgiveness or that your marriage will survive, this courageous integrity is the only way to open the door to rebuilding trust and working toward affair recovery together.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)1. Should I tell my wife everything about the affair?
Yes, honesty and transparency are crucial for rebuilding trust. While you don’t need to share graphic details that may cause unnecessary pain, you should disclose all relevant facts, including who the affair partner was, when it occurred, and how it ended. Being open helps prevent suspicion and supports healing.
2. How do I prepare for telling my wife about my affair?
Preparation involves choosing a private, distraction-free time and place, reflecting on what you want to say, and possibly seeking guidance from a counselor. Be ready to take full responsibility without blaming your wife or marriage, and prepare to answer her questions honestly and patiently.
3. What if my wife asks for details that might hurt her more?
It’s important to be truthful but also compassionate. You can explain that some details may cause more harm than healing and suggest discussing sensitive topics with a professional counselor. The goal is to provide enough information for understanding without inflicting additional trauma.
4. What is betrayal trauma?
Betrayal trauma is the deep psychological injury caused by a violation of trust in a core relationship, resulting in intense grief and a shattered sense of safety. This trauma is severely compounded when the truth is revealed in stages, as each new lie or withheld fact re-traumatizes the betrayed partner. Consequently, the betrayed individual’s nervous system can remain in a constant state of high alert, making them feel perpetually unsafe and as if they are waiting for the next painful “ambush”.
5. What support can help after disclosing an affair?
Both partners benefit from professional counseling to address emotional fallout and rebuild the relationship. Additionally, having trusted friends or family members who can provide confidential emotional support to your wife can alleviate feelings of isolation and shame during recovery.
Cultural scripts and traditional myths often oversimplify male desire, shrinking it into a single, physical dimension. But the reality is far more complex and beautiful. What if your understanding of male desire is only part of the picture?
Consider these real-life scenarios:
- A paramedic is drawn to a nurse, not because of her looks, but her strength and compassion under pressure.
- A husband of 15 years finds his deepest arousal in the shared history and profound trust with his wife, not her physical appearance.
- A husband on Reddit describes the best sex of his marriage beginning with a simple, vulnerable conversation, leading to deep connection.
These aren’t exceptions; they highlight a more nuanced truth about male desire that often goes unacknowledged. Let’s explore these common myths and uncover the real story.
Myth #1: For Men, Sex is Purely Physical, Not EmotionalThis is a tired cliché: “men want sex for connection, and women want connection for sex.” While there’s a grain of truth in it, this idea is far too reductionistic and misses the profound emotional layers of male desire.
Scientific research consistently debunks this oversimplification. A study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that emotional intimacy was a significant predictor of sexual satisfaction for both men and women. Men often seek connection, validation, and a sense of being desired through sexual activity. In fact, the experience of feeling emotionally close to a partner can be a powerful aphrodisiac for men.
Another key finding from a daily diary study in the same journal revealed that for both men and women in long-term relationships, higher levels of intimacy were associated with higher levels of sexual desire. This directly challenges the notion that male desire operates independently of emotional connection. Feeling emotionally close to a partner can be a significant catalyst for sexual desire in men.
Consider this perspective from a Reddit thread:
“The other night, we weren’t even planning on it. We were just talking on the couch for an hour, really connecting about our fears and future, and I felt so incredibly close to her. That feeling of being completely seen and accepted by her… that was the arousal. The sex that followed was on a completely different level. It wasn’t just bodies rubbing together; it felt like an affirmation of everything we were talking about. Without that connection, it’s just mechanics.”
This powerful anecdote underscores that men want to feel emotionally safe and connected. As Dr. Barry McCarthy, a professor of psychology and certified sex therapist, emphasizes, good sex for men doesn’t happen in a relational vacuum. Unresolved conflicts, constant criticism, or emotional distance are significant barriers to male arousal. Attending to emotional needs can profoundly improve the quality of sexual experiences for men.
Myth #2: Men Always Initiate SexThe traditional myth paints men as the perpetual initiators and women as the “gatekeepers” of sex. This cultural script, often perpetuated in media, suggests a one-sided dynamic where men are always pursuing, and women are always holding back.
However, these roles are actively changing, and research indicates that increased satisfaction for both partners is linked to more mutual and flexible initiation. This dynamic moves beyond rigid cultural scripts towards a relationship where desire can flow back and forth freely.
It’s important to distinguish between “desire” and “willingness to be aroused.” A partner might not always feel spontaneous desire, but their willingness to be receptive and engage can be a profound expression of love and commitment, fostering deeper connection. This willingness should flow both ways, not just from women.
Here’s another powerful story that illustrates this shift:
“Honestly, when my wife comes up behind me and kisses my neck and tells me she wants me, it’s the biggest turn-on in the world. For her to take the lead makes me feel seen and wanted in a way that just doesn’t happen when I’m always the one asking.”
This highlights a crucial point: men, like women, desire to be desired. A study in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality specifically found that both men and women desire to be desired, and mutual initiation is linked to higher relationship and sexual satisfaction. When a partner takes the lead, it signals desire and engagement, which can be incredibly arousing for men.
Moving away from these restrictive cultural ruts allows couples to experience a more vibrant and mutually fulfilling sexual life, built on shared desire and flexible responsiveness.
Myth #3: Men’s Sexual Desire is Driven Solely by Physical AppearanceWhile physical attraction certainly plays a role in initial interest, it is rarely the sole, or even primary, factor in long-term desire for men. This is a delicate topic, as we absolutely advocate for physical health and wellness as a gift to ourselves, our spouses, and our families. But the question remains: do you need a “perfect” body for your partner to desire you?
Psychological research emphasizes that a variety of factors contribute to male attraction and desire in established relationships. These include a partner’s intelligence, humor, kindness, and confidence. Emotional connection, shared experiences, and a partner’s expression of desire become increasingly important over time. The idea that men are perpetually “trading up” based purely on looks is simply not supported by the science of long-term attachment and bonding.
Let’s revisit the paramedic story:
“I’m a paramedic, and I started dating a woman who is an emergency room nurse. The first thing that made me truly ‘desire’ her had nothing to do with her looks, even though she’s lovely. It was seeing her in her element at work. She was so competent, compassionate, and in control under immense pressure. Seeing her care for people with such strength and grace was an unbelievable turn-on. It was pure admiration. That respect and awe for who she is as a person is at the core of my attraction. It’s a kind of desire that doesn’t fade when we’re tired or stressed or haven’t been to the gym. It’s an attraction to her character, and it’s rock solid.”
This clearly demonstrates that attraction extends far beyond physical traits. It’s about character, competence, and a deeper appreciation for who a person is. Similarly, consider this reflection from a husband after 15 years of marriage:
“After 15 years of marriage, do I still think my wife is physically hot? Yes. But is that what gets me going? Not really. What’s truly arousing is our shared history. It’s the inside jokes, the way she can finish my sentences, the feeling of complete trust. It’s watching her be an incredible mother to our kids. Sex becomes a reflection of that entire partnership. The idea that I would trade all that for a younger, ‘hotter’ body is insane. You don’t build a life with a body; you build it with a person. The desire is for the person.”
These stories highlight that for many men in committed, long-term relationships, desire is built on a foundation of shared life, emotional intimacy, and admiration for their partner’s qualities and actions. The body isn’t irrelevant, but it’s part of a larger, more intricate tapestry of connection and appreciation. The “dad bod” story later in the post further exemplifies this, where a wife finds her husband’s engagement with their children and his loving fatherhood to be incredibly attractive, seeing his body as beautiful within that context.
Myth #4: Men Are More Visual Than Women When It Comes to Sexual ArousalThis myth, closely related to the previous one, asserts that men are primarily visual when it comes to sexual arousal, while women are not. This is another pervasive cultural script that is undergoing a significant shift.
While historically men may have been given more “permission” for visual arousal, and this is still often portrayed as an all-or-nothing difference, the reality is far more nuanced:
- Shifting Cultural Norms: We’re seeing more male grooming and “manscaping,” indicating an increased emphasis on male physical presentation.
- Rising Female Visual Consumption: The consumption of pornography by women has risen significantly over the last two decades (up to 300-400% in some estimates), signaling that women are increasingly giving themselves permission to be visually aroused.
- Women’s Visual Arousal: Research, including studies using fMRI brain scans, confirms that women are also clearly aroused by visual sexual stimuli. While men, on average, may show a stronger physiological and self-reported response to a wide range of visual stimuli, the differences are a matter of degree, not an absolute.
- Context Matters for Women: Interestingly, research notes that the content and context of visuals matter for women, with some evidence suggesting they may be more responsive to stimuli that include relational and emotional cues. This means it’s not just about what they see, but the meaning and connection embedded within the visual.
Ultimately, this myth is being challenged by a growing understanding that both genders can be visually aroused, and that the expression of this arousal is influenced by cultural permission and personal experiences. It’s not about one gender being “more visual” than the other, but recognizing the complexity of human sexuality where visual cues interact with emotional connection and relational dynamics for both men and women.
This discussion also brings up another important point: the pressure society places on women’s physical appearance. It’s crucial for men to challenge their own biases and for women to feel empowered to ask for what they desire from their partners, including efforts in self-presentation that are not solely about meeting external beauty standards.
Beyond the Myths: Building Healthier, More Satisfying RelationshipsThe stories and research we’ve shared today collectively highlight a profound truth: male sexual desire is deeply intertwined with emotional connection, mutual respect, and a shared life. It’s about building a relationship with a person, not just a body.
Debunking these myths encourages us to move away from rigid, outdated cultural scripts and embrace a more flexible, compassionate, and mutually fulfilling approach to intimacy. When we foster emotional safety, encourage mutual initiation, and appreciate our partners for their whole selves – including their intelligence, kindness, humor, and shared experiences – we open the door to deeper connection and greater sexual satisfaction for everyone involved.
These conversations can sometimes touch a nerve, revealing ingrained biases or beliefs. If any of this resonated with you, and you feel ready to unpack some of your own assumptions or challenges related to intimacy and relationships, know that you’re not alone.
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Our team of licensed counselors is here to support you on your journey towards healing and growth. We believe everyone can benefit from therapy, and nobody should be too proud to seek help when they need it. Reach out for a free consultation call today at therapevo.com to get set up with a therapist who would be a good fit for you and your goals.
For centuries, female sexuality has been misunderstood, wrapped in myths that have been presented as truth. From assumptions that a woman’s sex drive diminishes after kids or is inherently lower than a man’s, to beliefs about what visually stimulates women, or that a “perfect body” is essential for great sex, these ideas often create unnecessary challenges in relationships. As licensed counselors, we’re here to take a deep dive into these common myths, looking at the latest research to help clarify and empower your understanding of female sexuality and relationship quality.
1: The Myth of the Expired Libido (Post-Baby & Menopause)A widespread belief suggests that after women have children, or once they reach menopause, their interest in sex simply disappears. However, research paints a much more nuanced picture, revealing a temporary state of adaptation rather than a permanent loss of desire.
Postpartum: A Time of AdaptationPhysical Reality: The period after childbirth involves significant physical healing, which can include pain (dyspareunia) and dramatic hormonal shifts. Lower estrogen levels can lead to dryness, while elevated prolactin (due to lactation) can suppress libido. These are real, physical barriers that impact sexual activity.
Psychological Reality: Beyond the physical, new mothers often experience overwhelming fatigue, a profound identity shift to “mother,” concerns about their body image, and the immense stress of caring for a newborn. These psychological factors are powerful contributors to a temporary dip in libido.
The Timeline: It’s crucial to understand that sexual satisfaction typically doesn’t return to pre-pregnancy levels overnight. Research indicates it’s a gradual recovery, often taking 12 to 18 months or even longer. This period is a phase, not a permanent end to sexual desire. It’s an investment in bringing a new life into the world, requiring couples to adjust their expectations. For men, being prepared for this extended timeline can prevent misunderstandings and a sense of disappointment that can lead to relational distance.
Menopause as a Transition, Not an EndThe narrative around menopause and female sexuality is often oversimplified, suggesting an inevitable decline. In reality, it’s a complex transition, not an abrupt halt.
Challenges: As women age, hormonal shifts, particularly lower estrogen levels, can lead to vaginal atrophy and reduced sensitivity, impacting the frequency of sex. General health considerations can also play a role.
Sexual Satisfaction Beyond Frequency: A crucial insight from research is that sexual satisfaction in a relationship is not dictated by the frequency of sex. In fact, relationship satisfaction itself is the single strongest predictor of a person’s sexual satisfaction at any stage of life. This means that a healthy, emotionally connected relationship is far more important than a numerical “score” of sexual encounters.
Key Predictors of Sexual Satisfaction: Emotional intimacy, deep emotional connection, effective communication, and a woman’s subjective perception of her own body are all strongly linked to sexual satisfaction.
Reframe the Narrative: Many women remain sexually active well into and after menopause. Some even report enjoying sex more without the fear of pregnancy. Solutions exist to manage physical changes, such as lubricants, moisturizers, localized estrogen treatments, and adapting sexual activities to new comfort levels. If sexual satisfaction is a concern, focusing on the quality of the overall relationship and seeking medical advice when needed is paramount.
2: The Myth of the “Lower” Female Sex DriveThe stereotype that a woman’s sex drive is inherently lower than a man’s is deeply ingrained in our culture. However, current data reveals that this isn’t a simple “lesser than” issue; it’s about two different operating systems and a wide range of individual experiences.
Averages vs. IndividualsWhile, on average, men may report more frequent sexual thoughts in studies, the overlap between genders is significant. Counter to popular belief, approximately one-third of women actually have a higher sex drive than the average man. This highlights that individual variation is immense, and blanket statements about gender differences in libido are often misleading.
Spontaneous vs. Responsive DesireThis is a core concept for understanding female sexuality:
Spontaneous Desire: This is the classic “out of the blue” desire, often associated more with men. It’s the feeling, without any external stimulation, of wanting sex.
Responsive Desire: For many women, desire awakens in response to arousal and intimacy. This means that the desire for sex grows as physical or emotional connection begins. This is not a “low” sex drive, but simply a different, and very common, pathway to arousal. Understanding this difference can help partners appreciate and navigate desire more effectively, realizing that “romancing” a woman is often a prerequisite for her desire to ignite.
The Power of ContextFemale desire is often more “plastic” and sensitive to relational factors. Emotional intimacy, trust, open communication, and low stress are often prerequisites for a woman to desire sex. When these foundational elements are strong, a woman is more likely to experience desire. Therefore, fostering a healthy, connected relationship becomes an investment in a couple’s long-term sexual satisfaction.
Desire Discrepancy is NormalMismatched libidos are a standard feature of long-term relationships. It’s not a female failing; men are just as likely to be the lower-desire partner. Blaming one partner for a perceived lack of interest misses the point. Instead, couples should focus on communication and mutual understanding, recognizing that different desires are normal and can be navigated through open conversation and a focus on relationship quality.
Key Takeaway: It’s not about the quantity or level of sex drive (higher vs. lower), but the quality of the relationship and the nature of desire (spontaneous vs. responsive) that truly matters for sexual satisfaction.
3: The Myth of the Unseeing Woman (Visual Arousal)The old adage “men are visual, women are not” has been largely debunked by modern neuroscience. Our brains don’t lie; fMRI studies show no significant gender difference in the brain’s fundamental neurobiological response to erotic images. The arousal machinery in the brain is similar for both males and females.
Content is King (and Queen)The key difference isn’t if women are visually aroused, but what they find arousing. Women respond more strongly to visuals that include context, romance, plot, and emotional connection. This broader definition of “erotic visual” for women includes:
- Seeing a partner act with confidence.
- Being in a beautiful or romantic setting.
- Observing a partner who is well-dressed or engaged in a meaningful activity.
For example, a woman might find her partner incredibly attractive when he is focused and competent, even if engaged in a mundane task like fixing a leaky pipe. This is not about a posed, static “sexy” image, but rather the unconscious power and focus of a partner demonstrating traits that foster emotional connection and admiration.
The Mind-Body DisconnectWhile a woman’s body can show physical signs of arousal, her brain can “veto” it if the visual content triggers negative feelings like shame, disgust, or anxiety. This cognitive appraisal means that even if the physical arousal response is present, negative associations can prevent it from leading to a desire for sex. This underscores the importance of a holistic approach to sexual intimacy that considers both physical and psychological factors, ensuring the visual experience is tied to positive emotional context within the relationship.
Key Takeaway: Women are absolutely visually stimulated; the myth is based on an overly narrow definition of what constitutes an “erotic visual.” Understanding what truly ignites visual desire for women can transform sexual connection.
4: The Myth of the “Perfect” BodyFinally, the pervasive idea that “better bodies have better sex” is arguably the most damaging myth of all. Research clearly indicates that sexual satisfaction is not linked to objective measures of attractiveness.
Perception, Not PerfectionSexual satisfaction is not tied to objective measures like BMI or weight. Instead, it is strongly linked to your subjective body image—how you feel about your body. If a woman feels good about her body, regardless of its objective appearance, she is more likely to experience better sexual satisfaction.
The “Spectator” EffectA negative body image can force an individual to become a self-critical observer of their own body during sex. This “spectator effect” acts as a cognitive distraction, pulling focus away from pleasure and connection with a partner and instead directing it inwards, killing arousal and pleasure. This internal self-critique can be incredibly detrimental to sexual experience.
What Really Predicts Good SexStudies analyzing dozens of factors consistently find that the top predictors of sexual satisfaction are psychological and relational, not physical attributes:
Overall relationship satisfaction: The health and stability of the relationship are paramount.
Emotional intimacy and romantic love: Deep connection and affection are strong foundations for good sex.
Believing your partner is satisfied: A partner’s perceived satisfaction significantly contributes to one’s own sexual fulfillment.
Good sexual communication: Open, honest, and vulnerable communication about desires, needs, and insecurities fosters a deeper and more satisfying sexual life.
For women, a significant antidote to body shame is vulnerability. Sharing insecurities with a partner can reduce shame without requiring any physical changes, leading to increased confidence and a more satisfying sexual experience.
Attractiveness as a “Gatekeeper”While physical appearance can be important for initial partner selection, its importance plummets dramatically in long-term relationships. In committed partnerships, relational factors far outweigh physical ideals. The quality of the connection and communication becomes the true measure of attraction and satisfaction.
Key Takeaway: The path to better sex isn’t about changing your body; it’s about cultivating self-acceptance and a strong, intimate connection with your partner.
The True Cornerstones of Sexual SatisfactionAcross all these myths, the science consistently points away from simple, rigid rules and towards a more complex and authentic truth. The mind and the relationship are where the magic truly happens. Context, communication, and connection are the true cornerstones for a fulfilling sexual life for women. It’s about moving beyond societal myths and embracing a nuanced understanding of desire, intimacy, and self-acceptance. If you find yourselves struggling to have these conversations or feeling stuck, seeking support from licensed marriage therapists can provide the tools and guidance needed to foster deeper connection and satisfaction in your relationship.
If you’ve ever found yourself caught in a frustrating cycle of trying to quit pornography—which can take many forms, including images, videos, and artwork—only to relapse days or weeks later, you’re not alone. Many people experience this pattern, often feeling like it’s a lack of willpower. In fact, many individuals are actually addicted and recognizing it as such is crucial for effective porn addiction recovery and relapse prevention.
This cycle is often accompanied by emotional and behavioral struggles that make breaking free even more difficult. Triggers, such as certain emotional states or environmental cues, can also play a significant role in ongoing relapse. But what if your struggle isn’t about willpower at all? What if it’s about a brain that’s been rewired to crave the very things you’re trying to escape?
Overcoming Addiction Is HardAs specialized counselors specializing in porn addiction and relationship counseling, we understand the profound challenges people face. Overcoming porn addiction can be incredibly challenging, requiring persistence, support, and effective strategies. Our goal is to offer empathetic, research-based wisdom to help you navigate these complex issues.
Numerous studies have explored the psychological and biological factors that contribute to porn addiction and inform effective recovery approaches. Today, we’re unpacking the science behind this addiction, the insidious role of shame, and the deeper emotional needs that often drive this behavior. We believe everyone can heal from addiction.
https://youtu.be/SAwiLbKT5p8?si=y_ogNHvJ1EzOcfRU
Introduction: What Is Porn Addiction?Pornography addiction, often referred to as problematic porn use, is a condition where a person finds themselves repeatedly struggling with the urge to watch porn, even when it leads to negative consequences in their life. This struggle can impact every area—damaging relationships with a partner or family, lowering self esteem, and increasing feelings of anxiety and depression. For many, the urge to consume porn becomes difficult to control, creating a cycle that feels impossible to break.
The negative consequences of porn addiction can be far-reaching, affecting not only the individual but also their loved ones. It can lead to secrecy, isolation, and a sense of being trapped by the habit. Fortunately, there is hope. With the right combination of professional help, support from community or loved ones, and healthy coping strategies, it is possible to recover and break free from the hold of porn addiction.
Whether you are seeking advice for yourself or someone you care about, remember that overcoming this challenge is possible, and reaching out for help is an important first step toward sobriety from porn addiction.
The Brain’s Role in Porn Use: Why We Keep RelapsingLet’s start in the brain and try to understand why a person’s porn habit is so hard to kick, and what makes pornography addictive.
“What Were You Thinking?”: The Neural DisconnectA common question we hear, both from individuals and their partners, is “What were you thinking?” in moments of disclosing that they used porn again. The surprising truth is, often, they weren’t thinking consciously about what matters. In the grip of compulsive behaviors, the part of your brain that desires the porn becomes profoundly disconnected from the part that sees and weighs the consequences. This means that while you might fully commit to stopping when you’re calm, in the moment of craving, your rational brain is essentially offline, leading to compulsive pornography use.
The Mesolimbic Dopamine Pathway: The “Wanting” CircuitAt the core of this disconnect lies the mesolimbic dopamine pathway, often called the brain’s “wanting” system. Located in the primitive midbrain and extending to the forebrain, this pathway is responsible for the intense “hit” or “high” associated with addictive behaviors.
When you consume pornography—whether videos, images, or stories—dopamine is released in the nucleus accumbens, creating a powerful reward signal for this compulsive sexual behavior. Over time, your brain becomes less responsive to this dopamine hit, requiring more frequent, longer, or more intense exposure to porn to achieve the same effect. This is why usage often escalates and, crucially, your brain also becomes less responsive to natural, healthy rewards.
Amygdala, Hippocampus, and Euphoric RecallThis primitive brain activity doesn’t stop there. The amygdala, our brain’s emotional center, becomes connected to this pathway, linking stress and negative emotions with the dopamine release.
Pornography consumption effectively “medicates” these difficult feelings by flooding the brain with “happy chemicals.” Furthermore, the hippocampus, where memories are stored, plays a key role through what we call euphoric recall. This isn’t just recalling the act itself, but the excitement, anticipation, and perceived discovery associated with past moments of watching pornography. It’s the brain’s way of reinforcing the behavior, making you feel excited about returning to it, much like anticipating a new date or a fun activity.
The Prefrontal Cortex: Impaired Decision-MakingIn stark contrast to these primitive reward circuits is the prefrontal cortex, the front of your brain responsible for higher-level thinking, decision-making, impulse control, and problem-solving. This is the part that helps you regulate behavior and weigh consequences – telling you that looking at porn might not be a good idea, or reminding you of how you will be upsetting your partner or girlfriend, or even suggesting healthier alternatives to reduce stress like engaging in physical activity, such as a jog, or spending time with loved ones.
In addiction, the prefrontal cortex becomes significantly impaired. The neural pathway between this rational, consequence-aware part and the desire-driven mesolimbic pathway weakens, or even disconnects entirely. This explains why, in moments of relapse, individuals often report feeling like they “weren’t thinking” or “just didn’t care anymore.” The part of your brain that could tell you to stop watching porn is not connected the part of your brain that is creating the desire to watch porn.
Reconnecting Neural Pathways for Lasting Porn Addiction RecoveryWhen caught in this cycle, the primitive, desire-driven circuits dominate, overpowering the complex, rational ones. Breaking free requires a dual approach. First, it’s crucial to deprive the mesolimbic dopamine pathway of its unhealthy highs. This means abstinence from pornography so your brain can re-attune to normal, healthy pleasures. Secondly, and equally vital to avoid relapse, is actively building and strengthening the neural pathway between the desire for pornography and the awareness of its negative consequences. For some, this might involve consciously reminding themselves of the fallout in moments of craving.
In addiction therapy, we use techniques like brainspotting to literally help rewire these connections, linking the desire for watching porn with the real-life consequences of watching porn. This helps rapidly build that neural connection so that your ability to stop watching porn before it happens is much morre present in your conscious mind.
Porn addiction therapy does even more to help you quit looking at pornographic material. A key part of this process is learning healthy coping mechanisms and better understanding your triggers, which supports long-term recovery. This work helps diminish the intense craving, allowing for the restoration of normal intimacy and connection.
Shame: The Hidden Fuel for Porn AddictsWhen the “Painkiller” Becomes the PainShame plays a profound and often counterintuitive role in perpetuating pornography addiction, especially for those who experience strong moral incongruence – the feeling that porn use goes against their core values. Many try to use shame as a motivator to stop, believing that self-punishment will deter future use. “If I beat myself up enough,” the thinking goes, “I’ll finally quit.”
However, this strategy backfires. Pornography can actually be a maladaptive coping mechanism for shame. The images often present an illusion of desire and validation, acting as an antidote to feelings of worthlessness and low self-esteem. Yet, after the act, the shame returns, often intensified.
This creates a vicious cycle: you feel bad, you use porn to temporarily alleviate the feeling, you feel worse afterwards, and then you use porn again to cope with the increased shame. Shame also thrives in secrecy, pushing individuals further into isolation and perpetuating the very behavior they wish to stop. It’s a painful paradox: the intended “painkiller” becomes the very source of the escalating pain.
Beyond “Just Horny”: Unpacking Deeper NeedsDebunking the “I’m Just Horny” MythOften, individuals rationalize pornography use by saying, “I’m just horny.” While sexual arousal is certainly part of the experience, this simplistic explanation often masks deeper psychological truths. The euphoric recall system can trick your brain into associating uncomfortable feelings with sexual arousal, making you believe that addressing your “horniness” will solve the underlying issue. For a porn addict, these rationalizations are common and can make it harder to recognize the need to find treatment. This promotes a sense of helplessness, as if the drive is an unstoppable force.
Culturally, there’s also a prevalent, yet often inaccurate, script that “men need release,” equating sex drive with basic biological needs like hunger. Unlike food, which is essential for survival, you won’t die without ejaculating. The body has natural mechanisms, like nocturnal emissions, to manage sexual tension. Believing these cultural myths lowers inhibition and rationalizes the addiction, leading to a cycle of seeking relief in unhealthy ways.
The Valid Longing for ConnectionWhat’s truly going on beneath the surface of “just horny” is often a deeper, valid longing that goes unmet. These longings manifest as uncomfortable feelings such as loneliness, sadness, anger, boredom, or grief for what’s missing in one’s life. Perhaps it’s a longing for genuine connection, deep friendships, or even healthy sexual relationship with a partner. When these legitimate emotional needs are unaddressed, porn (like sexual addiction) steps in as a distorted, short-term “solution” to medicate the discomfort. It distracts you from the pain of isolation or unmet intimacy, but ultimately, it leaves you feeling more disconnected.
It’s crucial to understand that these underlying feelings are valid, and there’s no shame in experiencing them. They are signals from your body and mind, prompting you to seek healthy ways to meet legitimate needs.
Cultivating Wholesome Relationships and CommunityThe path to true healing from addiction involves acknowledging these deeper longings and finding wholesome, healthy ways to fulfill them.
This means actively working to desexualize your need for connection. Instead of turning to porn, focus on building and curating genuine relationships with real people. This can include fostering emotional intimacy with a partner, deepening friendships with others (not just through texts or social media, but in-person or via meaningful calls), and actively engaging in community.
Support groups and community-based programs are especially beneficial for porn addicts, offering a safe space to share experiences and receive encouragement. There are also many resources available, such as therapy, educational tools, and online support, to help those seeking recovery. Whether it’s a sports team, a hobby group, or a faith community, re-establishing these connections helps address the core needs that porn attempts to medicate. By investing in these positive, shame-free relationships, you build a foundation of true well-being and lasting recovery from addictions.
The Role of Mental Health in Porn AddictionMental health is a key factor in both the development and recovery process of porn addiction. Many individuals struggling with porn addiction experience a range of difficult feelings, including guilt, shame, anxiety, and depression. These emotions can lead to a cycle where porn is used as a way to cope, but ultimately leads to even more distress and negative consequences. Over time, this can erode self esteem and make it even harder to break free from the habit.
Research shows that addressing mental health is essential for lasting recovery. A study found that psychologist-led individual therapy can be especially effective in helping people learn healthy coping strategies, manage urges, and address the root causes of their addiction. It’s important to remember that porn addiction is not simply a matter of willpower or personal weakness—it is a complex mental health issue that often requires professional help and support through therapy.
By focusing on mental health and seeking assistance from licensed therapists or support groups, individuals can learn to overcome their addiction, improve their emotional well-being, and create lasting change. If you or someone you love is struggling, know that help is available and recovery is possible.
Porn Addiction Treatment OptionsBreaking free from porn addiction is a journey that involves understanding your brain, dismantling shame, and addressing underlying, unmet emotional needs. Restricting access to pornographic content is a key strategy in reducing temptation and supporting recovery but it is not sufficient in itself. Using filtering tools and apps can help block or monitor content, making it easier to stay accountable.
It’s important to recognize that relapses can happen, so having a plan to manage them is essential for long-term success. There are various porn addiction treatment options available, including professional counseling, group therapy, and online or in-person support groups. Groups like Addicts Anonymous or Pure Desire offer peer support and community for those seeking recovery.
Psychotherapy is a solid choice for recovery, as one of the most powerful ways to dismantle the driving power of shame in addiction is to just talk to someone about it. And a porn addiction counselor is a safe, non-judgmental and confidential person to work through these issues with.
Why It’s Hard to Find Professional Help for Pornography TreatmentFinding professional help for pornography addiction can be challenging because many therapists tend to normalize porn use, often overlooking its compulsive and addictive aspects. This normalization can lead to a lack of understanding about the severity of the problem and the profound impact it has on individuals struggling with it.
Additionally, the shame associated with pornography addiction creates a significant barrier to seeking help. Many addicts feel isolated and misunderstood, and therapists who do not fully recognize the emotional turmoil and relationship disruptions caused by this addiction may not provide the support needed for effective recovery. This gap in awareness makes it harder for those affected to find the specialized care they require.
For this reason, it’s important to find a therapist who understands the ins and outs of porn addiction therapy and can help you work through the underlying issues, figure out why the pornographic material you pursued was such a hit for your brain, and break the hold of this addiction.
Ending Porn Addiction RelapsesIf you’re ready to take the next step towards healing, our team of porn addiction counselors at Therapevo Counseling are here to support you. You can connect with us via secure video call from the convenience and privacy of your residence and even schedule a free consultation to begin your transformational journey.
What if the struggles you face today are actually signs of childhood trauma you never knew you had? When we think of trauma, we often picture extreme events. But it’s possible that the persistent big emotions, the relentless perfectionism, or the constant people-pleasing you’ve experienced for years are actually signs of something deeper rooted in your past.
In this post, we’re going to uncover the hidden signs of childhood trauma that frequently manifest in adult life. These can include anxiety that never fades, the nagging feeling that you’re never good enough, or constantly overthinking relationships. You’ll learn the surprising ways unresolved trauma can affect your emotions, body, behavior, relationships, self-worth, and even your career. Most importantly, we’ll discuss how you can begin your healing journey with tools backed by psychology and compassion.
This isn’t about blame, nor is it meant to shame. Our goal is to empower you to understand why you feel the way you do. Perhaps that lingering grumpiness, the tendency to “fly off the handle,” or those dysregulated emotional eruptions have a reason beyond simply being “you.” Once you connect these dots, you can begin to break the cycle and start your healing today.
The Unseen Impact of Childhood WoundsMany adults navigate significant challenges in their relationships, work, and overall emotional well-being without ever realizing these issues stem from their childhood. Our discussion aims to foster self-awareness and compassion for what you may be experiencing.
What is Childhood Trauma? More Common Than You Think!Childhood trauma isn’t limited to what we might call “Big T” traumas – severe events like a car accident, a house fire, or experiencing violent crime. While these are undoubtedly traumatic, many distressing experiences that happen to us as children can also constitute “small t” traumas. These might be sudden moments of abandonment when a parent wasn’t there when you needed them, even something as seemingly innocuous as getting lost in a supermarket. In such a moment, the child’s world, which they thought was safe and reliable, can feel shattered, even if no one was physically harmed and help eventually arrived. This experience, while not a “Big T” trauma, can still be deeply traumatic in how it’s experienced and stored.
A significant portion of trauma also stems from what are known as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). These come from extensive research and include a list of 10 specific experiences:
- Physical abuse
- Sexual abuse
- Emotional abuse
- Living with someone who abused drugs
- Living with someone who abused alcohol
- Witnessing domestic violence in the home
- Living with someone who was sent to prison
- Living with someone with a serious mental illness (leading to dysregulation in the home)
- Losing a parent through divorce, death, or abandonment
It’s estimated that about 47% of people have experienced at least one ACE, with roughly 10% having four or more. The more ACEs an individual has experienced, the higher the likelihood that the impacts will manifest as symptoms in their adult life.
Why This Conversation Matters: Reducing Shame, Finding HealingThis conversation matters because it helps reduce the shame often associated with these struggles. When you understand that there’s a reason for your current behaviors or emotional patterns, it lessens self-blame. Instead of thinking “there’s something wrong with me,” you can begin to say, “this is why I’m doing this.” Once you’re aware of the root, you can then take steps towards healing. It’s crucial to remember that we’re not here to blame anyone, especially for “small t” traumas that weren’t intentional but still had an impact. The focus is on self-awareness and empowerment.
Unmasking the Hidden Signs: How Childhood Trauma Shows Up in AdultsChildhood trauma can manifest in various ways, often subtly weaving its way into our adult lives. Recognizing these signs is the first step towards healing.
Emotional Rollercoasters & Inner Turmoil: Psychological Signs of Past Trauma Persistent Sadness, Anxiety, or Depression That Won’t Lift: If you experience chronic feelings of sadness, anxiety, or depression that go beyond a temporary mood, these could be rooted in childhood trauma. * Difficulty Managing Emotions (Anger, Numbness, or Feeling Overwhelmed): Struggling with emotional regulation is a common sign. This might look like intense bursts of rage, feeling emotionally numb or flat, or being easily overwhelmed by feelings. We often say, “if it’s hysterical, it’s historical,” meaning if an emotional reaction is disproportionate to the trigger, there’s likely a deeper history at play. Your body may be crying out for past pain to be seen, named, and healed, or you might be rigidly locking down emotions out of fear of being flooded. * Negative Self-Talk & Low Self-Worth: A strong inner critic, low self-esteem, and persistent feelings of shame or guilt can be fueled by trauma, especially from relational experiences like neglect, anger in the home, or even violent corporal punishment. * Feeling Detached or Unreal (Dissociation): Moments where you feel unreal, not truly in your body, or checked out (depersonalization or derealization) can also be rooted in traumatic childhood experiences. * Always On Alert (Hypervigilance):* Constantly scanning for potential danger, anticipating bad things, and working excessively hard to keep everyone and everything safe can be a symptom of childhood trauma. This hyper-alertness makes it difficult to relax, be present, and trust that you’ll be okay.
Behavioral Clues: Actions That Might Signal Unresolved Trauma Self-Sabotage & Risky Behaviors: Engaging in harmful coping mechanisms like substance misuse, self-harm, or risky, dangerous activities can be a sign of unresolved trauma. * People-Pleasing & Weak Boundaries: An excessive need to please others, difficulty saying no, and consistently prioritizing others’ needs over your own (caretaking to the neglect of self-care) are very common for individuals who experienced childhood trauma, especially in homes with addiction. * Perfectionism Overdrive: While striving for excellence is healthy, when perfectionism becomes a burden, used to feel in control or worthy, or to compensate for feelings of shame, it can signal deeper unresolved trauma. * Indecisiveness & Fear of Failure (or Success!):* Chronic difficulty making decisions and an intense fear of either failing or even succeeding can indicate trauma’s impact on your actions.
Your Body Remembers: Physical Symptoms of Lingering TraumaOur bodies store trauma in the nervous system, even if our minds don’t consciously remember the events. This can manifest physically:
- Unexplained Aches, Pains, & Digestive Issues: Chronic headaches, stomach problems, digestive issues, and muscle tension without clear medical cause can be the body’s way of expressing unresolved trauma. This can also include a lack of bodily awareness, perhaps from growing up in an environment where you had to focus so much on external threats that you didn’t learn to tune into your own physical sensations.
- Sleepless Nights & Nightmares: Insomnia, restless sleep, and frequent nightmares are common signs that your body is trying to process stuck trauma.
Subtle & Overlooked Signs: The Less Obvious Ways Trauma Affects You Lack of Self-Compassion: Being excessively hard on yourself emotionally, or even physically (like not noticing minor injuries), can stem from a past where you didn’t receive the compassion you needed. * Persistent Feelings of Emptiness: A deep, vacated feeling of inner emptiness can be a symptom of unresolved trauma. * Self-Blame as a Default:* If you find yourself taking responsibility for things beyond your control, especially if you were blamed for difficult situations in childhood, this could be indicative of trauma. Children in challenging environments often blame themselves as a way to make sense of mistreatment.
Trauma’s Echoes: How It Impacts Your Adult Life & RelationshipsThe impact of childhood trauma doesn’t just stay in the past; it reverberates through our adult lives, significantly affecting our relationships and daily functioning.
Love & Romance: Why Past Trauma Can Sabotage Your Intimate Relationships Trust Issues & Fear of Intimacy: If primary caregivers were inconsistently available or reliably unavailable, your default might be to build walls and protect yourself rather than open up. This contributes to insecure attachment styles (anxious, avoidant) and interferes with deep intimacy. * Communication Breakdown & Toxic Conflict Cycles: Reactivity in relationships, like the “fight” response, can be an old fight-or-flight reflex from childhood. Dr. Gottman’s Four Horsemen (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling) can be amplified by trauma. For instance, growing up in a chaotic home might have taught you that the angriest child was the safest, leading to intense anger during adult conflict, even with a loving partner. * Choosing Familiar (But Unhealthy) Partners:* Sometimes, individuals unconsciously pursue situations similar to past traumas in a phenomenon called “traumatic repetition” or “reenactment.” This is a subconscious desire to re-experience the trauma but this time, come out feeling in control or safe. It’s also often about choosing what’s familiar, even if it’s unhealthy, because you know how to navigate it, unlike a gentle and compassionate relationship.
Family Fallout: Breaking the Cycle of Generational Trauma Strained Relationships with Parents & Siblings: Prominent strain in family relationships can often be a sign of unresolved past trauma within the family system. * Impact on Your Own Parenting Style & Kids: Childhood trauma significantly influences our emotional availability, patience, and ability to regulate our own emotions as parents. You might find yourself reacting disproportionately to your child’s behavior, realizing it’s your own unresolved “stuff” coming up. * Understanding Intergenerational Trauma:* This fascinating concept highlights how pain can be passed down through generations. Epigenetics suggests that trauma can be stored in our DNA. For example, if your mother experienced trauma while pregnant with you, your body might have been born with programming to react to that threat. This is notably seen in children of Holocaust survivors. Trauma can also be passed down through learned behaviors within families.
Friendship Fractures: When Past Trauma Affects Platonic Bonds Difficulty Trusting Friends & Forming Close Connections: If vulnerability was exploited in childhood, you might protect yourself by staying guarded or isolated, making it hard to lean into close friendships. * Boundary Battles (Enmeshment or Distancing): You might swing between extremes: either meshing too closely with people (trying to find safety through deep attachment, then feeling rejected when they pull back) or completely avoiding connection. * Social Anxiety & Avoiding Connection:* Trauma can fuel social anxiety, leading to a reluctance to engage in social settings, especially during periods of increased stress.
Workplace Woes: Childhood Trauma’s Impact on Your Career Navigating Office Politics & Challenges: While every workplace has politics, if you react with extreme intensity to colleagues or bosses, it might be due to past trauma amplifying your current reactions. * Performance Pressure & Stress: Trauma can affect job performance, career adaptability, and job stability. When you’re struggling internally, it inevitably impacts your professional life, creating a cascading effect. * Authority Issues:* A significant struggle with authority, leading to excessive defiance or rebellion (e.g., “nobody’s going to tell me what to do”), can be a strong indicator of unresolved childhood trauma.
Healing is Possible: Finding Your Path to Recovery & WholenessThe good news is that healing is absolutely possible, and you are not broken beyond repair. Understanding your past is a powerful first step towards recovery.
The First Step: The Power of Acknowledging Your Trauma StoryOften, we haven’t told anyone our trauma story. While not everyone is equipped to hold your story with the sacred care it deserves, finding a safe, empathic listener is crucial. Someone who can genuinely say, “Man, that sucks,” or “I can’t imagine how hard that was for you,” can help you feel seen, validated, and heard. Being able to debrief and name your experiences in a safe space can significantly reduce the risk of PTSD and help resolve the trauma. For example, for years Caleb had recurring nightmares of being caught in public without pants. The memory of being a new kid in grade three, running late for gym class, and forgetting gym shorts – causing the whole class to laugh – was a small ‘t’ trauma that lived in the nervous system. Once this story was told to a safe person who validated the embarrassment, the nightmares stopped. Telling your story can be profoundly powerful.
Letting Go of Shame, Embracing Self-Compassion: Rewriting Your Inner NarrativePart of telling your story is letting go of the shame. When something feels shameful, we keep it secret. But acknowledging the impact trauma has had on you, and sharing it, helps release that shame. It’s vital to understand that trauma responses are not character flaws. There’s nothing “wrong” with you. These responses are often your body’s attempt to protect you or cope with overwhelming experiences, even if they’re unhelpful in the present. Embracing self-compassion for your body’s resilience and its attempts to cope or resolve itself is a key part of the healing process. Healing may be like peeling an onion. As you process one layer, another might emerge, but you don’t have to tackle everything at once. Healing takes time.
How Therapy Can Help: Exploring Effective Treatments for Childhood TraumaA significant understanding in the therapy world over recent years is that trauma cannot simply be “talked out” or “thought through” cognitively. Effective therapies generally involve safely and gently revisiting the experience, often from a more compassionate, mature perspective. This “bottom-up” processing allows the body and nervous system to process and consolidate memories, resolving the trauma so it no longer triggers big reactions or leaks into daily life.
Here are some evidence-based therapies proven effective for treating trauma:
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): A popular and well-researched therapy, particularly effective for processing distressing memories.
- Somatic Experiencing (SE): Focuses on the bodily sensations and nervous system responses to trauma, helping to release stored energy and promote regulation.
- Brainspotting: A fast and efficient method that combines body-based processing with specific eye positions to access and resolve trauma stored in the brain and nervous system. It allows for “titrated” processing, meaning difficult memories can be revisited in very measured, safe ways to avoid re-overwhelming or re-traumatizing the individual.
- Emotion Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT): Involves revisiting past experiences with your older, wiser self to provide what was needed in that moment but not received, effectively repairing relational and attachment wounds.
- Internal Family Systems (IFS): Views the psyche as comprised of various “parts” (e.g., an “angry part”). This approach helps individuals understand and integrate these parts, which often hold traumatic burdens.
When seeking a therapist, it’s highly recommended to ask about their specific trauma treatment modality. While many therapists are “trauma-informed,” meaning they understand trauma, you want someone who uses a specialized tool for treatment and resolution. Ask them to name an acronym you can research (like EMDR, SE, Brainspotting, EFIT, IFS, TF-CBT, DBT). Therapists often learn these specialized techniques after graduate school, as general education provides awareness but not specific treatment methods.
A Message of Hope & Empowerment: You Are Not Broken, and Healing is Within ReachYou are not broken, nor are you beyond repair. While you may feel wounded, healing is an innate capacity. Self-awareness is the key first step; once you recognize what’s happening, you can seek help and find healing. Remember, healing is a journey, not a destination. It’s about today being a little better than yesterday, taking small, consistent steps. Your body will also let you know when the next layer of healing needs attention, bringing it to the surface when you’re ready.
If this discussion has resonated with you and you’re ready to explore healing, please feel free to reach out to our counseling agency. You can find more information on our trauma page at therapevo.com. We prioritize matching individuals with therapists on our team who have the specific skill set to meet their needs. If your situation requires expertise we don’t possess, we’ll gladly refer you to a specialist. For us, ensuring you receive the right treatment is paramount. We offer all our work via Zoom video calls, making support accessible wherever you are.
Do you find yourself repeatedly involved with people who leave you feeling drained, confused, or questioning yourself? Have you ever wondered, "Why do I keep attracting toxic people?" If so, you're not alone.This question often places the blame squarely on your shoulders, leading to significant self-blame and shame, especially if you've been harmed repeatedly. But here's the truth: It’s not just about who you passively attract. The real issue lies in how individuals with exploitative, manipulative, or abusive behaviors actively target specific vulnerabilities and even positive characteristics in others.In this article, we'll uncover the psychology behind these toxic relationship patterns. We'll show you how manipulators identify and exploit vulnerabilities, reveal their subtle and overt tactics, and most importantly, provide you with research-backed tools to heal, build resilience, and break free from these cycles for good. This isn't about blaming yourself; it's about understanding the pattern, reclaiming your power, and learning how to choose healthier, happier connections.Shifting the FocusThe word "toxic" is frequently used, and in our profession, it generally refers to people who engage in harmful behaviors: exploitation, manipulation, abuse, or general disrespect. If you're experiencing this, we want to shift the focus from the self-blaming question, "Why do I attract toxic people?"The Trap of Self-BlameThe question "Why do I keep attracting toxic people?" places the onus entirely on the person who has been harmed. It implies that something is fundamentally wrong with you that draws these individuals in. This perspective can lead to deep shame and a feeling of being inherently flawed, especially if it's a recurring pattern. People struggling with this often ask, "What is wrong with me?"—a truly difficult and painful place to be.New Perspective: They Actively Target VulnerabilitiesWe want to shift away from the idea of passive attraction to focusing on how exploitative individuals actively target others. They aren't just randomly showing up; they are often consciously or subconsciously seeking out specific traits and vulnerabilities. This means the responsibility for the manipulative or abusive behavior lies solely with the person exhibiting it, not the target.Responsibility: Where It Truly LiesThe person who abuses or exploits is the one responsible for those actions. Understanding this is crucial because it takes the burden of blame off the person who has been targeted. While you may have vulnerabilities, the issue is their exploitation by someone else. As counselors, we believe you should be able to have your vulnerabilities, your challenges, your past experiences, and not be taken advantage of. You should be able to heal and exist in the world without fear of exploitation.The Predator Analogy: Understanding the DynamicConsider a predator analogy. A bunny in a garden, happily eating, might ask, "Why do I attract hawks and coyotes?" This isn't the right question because it implies the bunny is flawed. Bunnies are resilient and vital to the ecosystem. They aren't inherently wrong for being bunnies.A better question for the bunny is, "How can I be safer in this world, given there are predators, and I don't have many defenses?" This shifts the focus from self-blame to understanding the environment and developing strategies for safety and resilience. Similarly, for humans, having vulnerabilities doesn't make you flawed; it makes you human. The focus needs to be on understanding how to navigate relationships safely when exploitative people exist.Vulnerabilities are Not Flaws: They Are TargetedThis is a critical point: Vulnerabilities are not personal defects or flaws. They often stem from past experiences like trauma, attachment injuries from early caregiver relationships, or even inherent personality traits like a high degree of empathy. To healthy people,
The discovery of a partner's betrayal can instantly shatter your world, leaving you reeling with shock, disbelief, and profound pain. This isn't an exaggeration; it's a deep psychological impact that can trigger an "existential crisis," questioning trust, shared reality, and even your own self-worth. This guide offers immediate, trauma-informed "lifelines" to help you navigate these overwhelming initial hours and days, focusing on self-preservation amidst the chaos.Understanding the Initial Impact: Why You Feel This WayDiscovering a partner's betrayal is widely recognized as a traumatic event. Concepts like Betrayal Trauma, developed by Dr. Jennifer Freyd, describe the specific injury when someone you depend on for safety violates that trust. While not a formal diagnosis, Post-Infidelity Stress Disorder (PISD) describes a real cluster of trauma symptoms similar to PTSD, arising from infidelity. Experts like Sheri Keffer and Michelle Mays highlight that betrayal trauma deeply affects the attachment bond and can mimic symptoms of Complex PTSD, underscoring the severity of the psychological wound.The immediate aftermath often brings a symphony of painful reactions:Emotional Overwhelm: Intense waves of anger, profound sadness, grief, pervasive fear, anxiety, confusion, and jealousy.Cognitive Disarray: Difficulty concentrating, racing thoughts, intrusive mental images of the betrayal, and obsessive rumination.Physical Symptoms: Nausea, tension headaches, migraines, profound fatigue, changes in appetite or sleep patterns, heart palpitations, and muscle tension.Numbness or Dissociation: Feeling emotionally numb, detached, or as if you're living in a dream. This is a psychological defense against overwhelming pain.Hypervigilance: Being constantly on edge, scanning for threats, and an inability to relax or feel safe.Loss of Trust: Deep trust issues not only with the unfaithful partner but potentially with others and your own judgment.Shame and Self-Blame: Questioning what you did wrong, if you're responsible, or if you're "not good enough."It's crucial to understand that these reactions, however extreme, are normal human responses to an incredibly painful and abnormal situation. You're not "going crazy"; you're experiencing the effects of trauma.This profound traumatic impact often stems from the shattering of the attachment bond. Romantic partners become primary attachment figures, sources of safety and security. When this trusted figure becomes the source of pain, it creates an "attachment-based bind." The person you'd normally turn to for solace is the cause of your distress, leading to intense emotional and physiological dysregulation, often mirroring Complex PTSD.Furthermore, the trauma is often amplified by deception. Dr. Omar Minwalla argues that infidelity often involves creating and maintaining a "secret, separate reality" or a "secret sexual basement." This "deceptive compartmentalization" is a "profound system of deliberate deception," which he characterizes as a form of psychological abuse. The betrayed partner discovers they've been living in a manipulated reality, leading to profound confusion and questioning of their own sanity—a hallmark of gaslighting. Recognizing this element of systemic deception is vital for challenging self-blame; you are not at fault for "not knowing" or for the betrayal itself if you've been actively and intentionally deceived.Your First 7 Lifelines: Trauma-Informed Steps for Immediate Self-PreservationIn the disorienting whirlwind after betrayal, these concrete, trauma-informed actions can provide crucial direction and immediate self-preservation.Action Item 1: Prioritize Your Immediate Safety (Physical and Emotional)What & Why: The initial shock throws your nervous system into overdrive. The absolute first priority is to create a sense of safety, however minimal, to begin calming this acute stress response.
Infidelity vs. Sex Addiction: Navigating Betrayal and Paths to HealingWhen betrayal hits, the pain runs deep. It's an experience that shatters trust and leaves individuals grappling with intense emotions and profound uncertainty. Understanding why it happened can be the first vital step toward healing. But sometimes a deeper question comes up: Is it infidelity, a heartbreaking breach of trust, or something more complex, like sex addiction? Today, we're diving into one of the most misunderstood topics in relationships to help bring clarity to your situation.As licensed counselors, we approach this delicate subject with profound compassion and a non-judgmental stance, recognizing that this information may be encountered by both those who have betrayed and those who have been betrayed, often during a very fragile and intense moment in their relationship history. Our aim is to provide educated, understandable, friendly, and empathetic guidance.This discussion will address some of your toughest questions, including:What are the key differences between infidelity and sex addiction?What are the signs and symptoms of sex addiction?I just found out about my partner's affair: how do I know if this is a one-time thing or the start of an addiction?What role does pornography play in infidelity and sex addiction?Are there assessments for sex addiction that I can use and trust?Let's get into it.Understanding Infidelity vs. Sex Addiction: Key DifferencesOne of the most common questions we hear is, "How do I know if this is infidelity or addiction?" When a couple is grappling with a recent discovery or disclosure, it can be incredibly challenging to differentiate between these two distinct patterns of behavior. While both involve sexual acting out outside of a committed relationship and cause immense pain, their underlying drivers and characteristics differ significantly.Defining InfidelityAt its core, infidelity is defined as sexual activity with someone other than a primary romantic partner or spouse. It's important to clarify that today's discussion focuses specifically on sexual infidelity, not emotional affairs. While emotional affairs are undoubtedly a profound betrayal and cause deep hurt, they do not fall under the clinical definition of sexual infidelity, which specifically involves sexual behaviors.Infidelity can manifest in various ways: it might be a single, isolated incident, or it could involve multiple extramarital partners, either serially or even simultaneously. The complexity increases when, for instance, an affair partner is also a sex trade worker, or if a long-term, even decade-long, secondary relationship or "second family" scenario exists. Even in such severe cases, the behavior can still be classified as infidelity if certain key elements of addiction are absent.Defining Sex AddictionSex addiction, in contrast, is characterized by a recurrent failure to resist sexual impulses. The most crucial differentiator here is the concept of impulse control, or rather, the lack thereof. This isn't just about having sex multiple times with an affair partner; it's about a high level of spontaneity, impulsiveness, and uncontrollability surrounding the sexual activity. The individual feels compelled to act despite a desire to stop.Core Differentiators Between Infidelity and Sex AddictionImpulse Control: This is paramount. With sex addiction, there's a profound lack of impulse control, where the individual feels driven by compulsive urges. In infidelity, while there's a choice made to betray, it typically doesn't exhibit the same level of uncontrollability.Escalation Over Time: Infidelity might deepen emotionally over time, but sex addiction often involves an escalation in the intensity, frequency, and risk of the sexual behaviors. This can mean progressing from one type of acting out to another, or engaging in increasingly dangerous scenarios.
In the intricate dance of life and relationships, the concept of boundaries often arises as a critical tool for maintaining balance and well-being. However, despite their importance, many people unknowingly approach boundary setting in ways that are counterproductive, manipulative, or even harmful to themselves and their relationships. As trained and licensed counselors, we frequently encounter individuals struggling with this very issue; feeling overwhelmed, burnt out, or trapped by dynamics they desire to change.Our goal today is to demystify healthy boundaries and show you how to implement them effectively. There are two primary situations where boundaries become essential:Overextension and Burnout: This occurs when you find yourself saying "yes" to too many demands on your time, energy, and involvement, leading to exhaustion and a sense that your own priorities are constantly being pushed aside. Learning to say "no" is crucial here to reclaim a manageable life.Relationship Challenges: This involves situations where someone is consistently not treating you with respect or kindness, or where the interaction itself is becoming harmful. These are the boundaries that require careful articulation to safeguard your emotional and psychological space.While both aspects are vital, our focus today is on the second scenario: setting boundaries within relationships. We'll delve deep into how to articulate a healthy boundary that feels authentic, isn't controlling or manipulative, and ultimately fosters healthier, more respectful relationships.1. How Boundary-Setting is AbusedIt's common to see boundaries being used incorrectly, leading to misunderstandings and further relational damage. Many people believe they are setting a boundary when, in reality, they are engaging in behaviors that undermine the very purpose of healthy limits. Let's explore some common misuses:Ultimatums: The "If You Do X, I'll Never Speak to You Again" ApproachAn ultimatum is often a desperate attempt to protect oneself or prevent a harmful situation. For example, telling someone, "If you do that again, I'll never speak to you." While the desire for safety is understandable, ultimatums rarely work in a pro-relational way. The problem is that they force the boundary-setter into a position of rigid enforcement. If the person crosses the line, you are then obligated to follow through, even if you don't want to sever the relationship entirely. This can leave you feeling trapped by your own declaration, and it often creates a dynamic that is not conducive to mutual growth or a healthy connection. It’s like saying, "I value the absence of this behavior more than I value our ongoing relationship," which isn't always the case, especially if the relationship is otherwise important.Coercive Control: Forcing Behavior Through "Boundaries"Another misuse is disguised as coercive control, where the "boundary" is an attempt to force someone else to do or stop doing something. Consider the common parenting trap: "If you don't clean your room, I'm going to take away your favorite toy." While consequences for children are necessary, this can easily devolve into manipulation if the consequence is disproportionate or unrelated, or if the primary goal is control rather than teaching responsibility. The true purpose of a boundary is not to make someone change their behavior for your comfort, but to define the terms under which you are willing to engage. If your "boundary" is just a veiled threat to get what you want, it lacks the invitational, relational quality of a healthy limit.Manipulation: Consequences Unrelated to the BoundaryManipulation is closely linked to coercive control. This is when you use consequences that are completely unrelated to the behavior you're trying to address, or when you use power to compel someone. For instance, an older parent saying to an adult child, "If you don't spend more time with me,
Have you ever felt constantly on edge? Like no matter how much you try to relax, your body just won't let you? Maybe you struggle with sleep, feel disconnected from others as you go through daily life, or find yourself reacting to situations in a way that surprises you.It's just kind of not you. And the worst part is, you don't really know why.Today we're breaking down what PTSD looks like. We’ll discuss how it can show up in your daily life and the twelve leading signs that you may be living with unresolved trauma. We'll explore why these patterns develop, how they affect your relationships and daily experiences, and what steps you can take to start making sense of it all.To make this as helpful as possible, we will pull from our experience as therapists who work with trauma survivors. We’ll also refer to the book “The Body Keeps Score,” by trauma expert Dr. Bessel van der Kolk.Whether you've been through a major life event or a series of smaller things that have stacked up on you, if you feel like something isn't quite right, this post could give you the clarity that you've been searching for around PTSD and whether that describes what you have been experiencing.Dr. van der Kolk outlines twelve leading symptoms of complex PTSD. We're going to break these down for you here. 1. HypervigilanceThe first leading symptom of PTSD is a constant feeling of unsafety and hypervigilance. Dr. van der Kolk says that patients with PTSD are always on guard. Their bodies are chronically tense and defensive as if they're still in danger now. We often see this play out in our therapy sessions.When people come in for counseling, they don’t necessarily use the word “hypervigilance.” Instead, they tend to say things like, “I’m very aware of everything that's happening around me.” They say they feel like they’re “always on watch,” they’re “very aware of others and interactions,” and that they're “always on guard.” They may also say that they “feel super awake, all the time.” Hypervigilance after betrayal: As therapists, we do a lot of work with survivors of betrayal – of infidelity or when your partner has an affair, for example. Our clients who have experienced this type of trauma often tell us that they always feel very aware of when their partner gets a text message. They're keyed right in on that little text notification. If something's a little bit off about how their partner is conducting themselves, or if their partner is two minutes late - things that would've never bothered them in the past - suddenly catch their attention. That’s hypervigilance.One of the biggest things our clients have talked about is always tracking their spouse. If their spouse is out of the home, they need to know exactly where they are at all times. And it's because they’re not feeling safe, so they have to try and make themselves feel safe in some way.Hypervigilance after medical trauma: People can experience hypervigilance around medical traumas as well. Just the other day, we observed a parent whose child went through a major prolonged illness that involved immense hopelessness and fear of losing the child. Thank God, the child did recover and everybody's doing great today physically. But this parent expressed feeling that same hypervigilance and alertness even today, even though the child is healthy. It’s been quite some time of decent health, and the child’s health is getting better all the time. And still, if there's anything off about her – if she has a little cough or something, this parent is right on it. That's an example of hypervigilance in a medical and familial context. That is one of the characteristics of PTSD.Show Yourself CompassionWe want to encourage you to have compassion for yourself if you're experiencing hypervigilance. This is happening because your nervous system and your body went through a very dangerous situation. Whether the danger was about you or someone dear to you,
Have you ever had a conversation with your spouse where you just couldn’t get through to them? You’re trying to explain something, but they’re either not listening or completely misunderstanding you. Or maybe a small miscommunication turned into a bigger argument, leaving you wondering, “What just happened?”Here, we break down the five key fundamentals that make marriage communication strong, clear, and full of love. We talk about how to truly understand each other, create a safe space for honest conversations, and build deeper trust in your relationship.We also give you a few exercises you can do today to strengthen your marriage connection. Whether you’re newly married or have been together for years, these five fundamentals can transform the way you and your spouse communicate.Empathy and Understanding: The Foundation of ConnectionThe first key to strong marriage communication is empathy and understanding. This is the foundation of communication. We like this quote by Montgomery:The goal of quality communication is the achievement and maintenance of interpersonal understanding.[i]In other words, the reason we communicate at all is so we can understand each other. We want to get to a place of understanding and stay in a place of understanding. Let’s take a close look at empathy. What Is Empathy?An easy definition of empathy that we like is this:“When I stand in your shoes and look at the world through your lens, through whatever you’re experiencing… when I put myself in that place…it makes sense that you feel what you do.”When we work with couples, there’s one phrase we use a lot: “It makes sense.” This is a basic affirmation of reality. It’s a way of expressing empathy. It doesn’t mean that you agree with everything they say. It’s understanding: “If I were in your shoes, having walked to this point, I would be reacting the same way; your reaction makes sense.”The 3 Components of EmpathyThere is a widely accepted conceptualization of empathy that says it has three main components.[ii] They are cognitive, emotional, and motivational. Let’s talk about these.Cognitive empathy: The first is called cognitive empathy, which is just the recognition and understanding of the emotional states of others. So, in my brain, I’m aware that you are having sadness right now because there are tears coming down. Cognitive empathy is that attention and awareness of what your spouse is experiencing. We call that attunement in other kinds of therapy.Emotional empathy: The second component is emotional empathy. This part of empathy is experience sharing. It means that I share your emotion. I still maintain a distinction between myself and you, but I share in what you are experiencing and feeling.Our readers who are empaths sometimes may have to remind themselves that there is that distinction between self and other. So, if you’re upset about something that happened at work, I don’t have to go storming into your office to solve the problem on your behalf. Instead, I get upset alongside you, I see that your reaction makes sense, and I feel the upset, but I know there is a distinction between self and other.Motivational empathy: The third component of empathy is motivational empathy. This is also known as empathic care. Motivational empathy is having feelings of concern for the other and having a willingness to put effort into improving their well-being. If I have empathy for you, it’s motivating me to do something to care for you.Now, sometimes we harp on men a little bit when we do seminars. Sometimes men tend to rush to solutions. That’s motivational empathy, sure, but this problem-solving part is at the back of the list. Men often jump straight to “I’m concerned about you and I want to help you solve this.” But, timing is important with this. Before jumping to solve the problem, it’s important to first join your spouse in the emotional experience, notice, and validate.
We discuss our personal experiences, including burnout, career changes, and coping with the pandemic. The episode covers the transition from our old OnlyYouForever brand to the new Therapevo Counselling brand, highlighting the expanded focus on diverse counseling topics and services. We also touch on rebranding the podcast to 'Normalize therapy.' and adding a new YouTube channel. We talk about upcoming content and plans to expand our social media presence and blogging.
There’s a level of control that occurs in relatively few marriages that we would see as part of an abusive power and control dynamic. But then there’s a lower level of control that doesn’t come from an abusive spouse that can still be frustrating and lead to conflict in the marriage.
We’ve talked about the abusive kind of control before, so if you want to learn more about that kind of control feel free to go back to our previous episodes of the podcast to learn more about what that looks like.
Today, we’re talking about the annoying kind of controlling. This is not so much about the spouse’s power and dominance as the controlling spouse’s worry, fear, anxiety, and maybe even mental health issues that are driving this behavior. And sometimes the non-controlling spouse may also be acting in ways that prompt this behavior. If you’re listening to this to try to figure out your spouse, you may ask yourself what your role might be and how might you help your spouse feel less of a need to be in control.
Where Control Issues Come From
- Fear
Control issues are often rooted in fear. This is the first place to look. If you’re afraid and you want to make it safer, you’re going to want to control the variables. This is quite a common response to fear.
Fear can come from a number of different places. One place fear can come from is trauma. When something very frightening or overwhelming happens, it may cause a person to install certain requirements or demands in order to preserve safety. For example, you’ve been in a late night car accident, and you now want to control all of the family travel so that there’s no late-night travel going on and no one is allowed to go out after dark. So now you’ve become “controlling.” You’ve installed requirements or demands on others in order to preserve your sense of safety and well-being, to stop the horror from repeating itself.
Another source of control is abandonment (fear of being left alone). If you were left alone at some point as a child or at a point in your marriage, that may result in the kind of controlling behavior where you don’t let your spouse do things on their own or do certain things on their own. You always have to be there, or you always have to do things together.
- Betrayal
Betrayal may also lead to controlling relationships with certain kinds of people in order to prevent re-betrayal. For example, if in your first marriage you were sexually betrayed by your spouse, in your second marriage you may marry a faithful person, but you exert control on them to make sure that that previous betrayal doesn’t re-occur, much to the frustration of your current spouse. That can get difficult because it can cause such distress in your marriage that there’s an emotional separation, or drifting apart that occurs between you. Thus, controlling behavior can lead to further dysfunction.
In another scenario, if you’re a late teenager and you saw your father gamble away your family’s savings and eventually lose the home, job, etc., that’s a major financial betrayal. And later in life when you are a mom you may think you’re a super budgeter, but there’s actually a ton of control over where every penny goes. So, in this situation if the husband buys a chocolate bar and the wife gets upset and he may get frustrated and say “can I not even buy a chocolate bar without asking your permission?” This is clearly a higher level of control than just a healthy budgeting habit.
- Mental Health Issues
Now that we’ve talked about a few fear-related causes of control, we’re going to move on to look at mental health. Some mental health issues can cause controlling behavior. Take personality disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Someone with BPD may say if you leave, I’ll hurt myself, or I might not be ok somehow (there’s a clinging aspect of BPD that does relate to fear of abandonment, but it is also a mental health condition and the fear piece is a part of...
This is a subject we’ve wanted to address for some time. We see some irony in the work we do with couples or individuals when it comes to abuse. Often, though not always, people who are in a relationship with a truly abusive person do not realize it. On the other hand, couples who are in high conflict often label the other person as abusive when they are not really an abusive person, although they may relate to abusive tactics from time to time. So, the ‘abuse’ word gets abused sometimes. And other times, when it should be used, it’s not. So, we hope we can provide some clarity today by going through some of these emotionally abusive behaviors.
One distinction we want to make right off the bat is that probably all of us at some point in time have resorted to using one or more of the abusive tactics we are going to discuss in this episode. There’s a difference between bad behavior and a more fundamental problem of being an abusive person. The latter is a more characterological issue: it’s a way of seeing one’s intimate partner all the time as someone to be controlled, dominated, manipulated to serve you, as less than you. On the other hand, many of us in conflict may use some abusive tactics — that’s not acceptable either, but it’s nowhere near the scale of severity compared to a spouse who faces a characterologically abusive person every day. It may just be that your marriage is normal, there’s no cycle in that sense, but when you get into conflict, you might use unpredictability or blame. That’s bad too, but not problematic in the same way as abuse.
The key distinction between resorting to abusive behavior when in conflict and being in an abusive marriage is that the cycle of abuse is always happening in an abusive marriage. We talk extensively about being in an abusive marriage in episodes 123, 124, and 125.
Generally, abusive behavior can be verbal, emotional, and/or physical. Right now, we’re focusing on emotional abuse. Emotional abuse can include verbal assault, dominance, control, isolation, ridicule, or the use of intimate knowledge for degradation. This is the kind of abuse that targets the emotional and psychological well-being of the victim in order to gain power over them. It is often (though not always) a precursor to physical abuse.[1]
Some types of physical behavior can be considered emotional abuse in that they involve acts of physical violence although the victim is never physically impacted. Examples include: throwing objects, kicking a wall, shaking a finger or fist at the victim (threateningly), driving recklessly while the victim is in the car, or threatening to destroy objects the victim values.[2]
Emotionally Abusive Behavior
- Gaslighting
According to Paige Sweet, gaslighting is "a type of psychological abuse aimed at making victims seem or feel 'crazy,' creating a 'surreal' interpersonal environment (so bad it didn’t seem real) (p. 851).[3] It’s more of a gendered phenomenon that occurs in power-laden intimate relationships where the wife is dependent, not the husband. The husband brings the social and economic capital to the relationship, and so has a degree of power that he can abuse. It promotes the idea that women are overly emotional, irrational and not in control of their emotions.
Signs of Gaslighting:
Spouses who gaslight will often "flip the script.” That’s the basic tactic: whatever actually happened, they’ll say something else happened. You heard them say XYZ, they’ll deny saying it at all or tell you it was actually ZYX and you must be losing it for not remembering. When there’s not another witness and your spouse is doing this constantly, it erodes your sense of self-trust. There’s lots of lies: about what was said, what actually happened, and who did what. This is usually more subtle, rather than a blatant thing.
Another tactic is to use your insecurities against you: you’re worried because he didn’t come home last night?
How do I know if I can trust my spouse again? This question represents one of the most profound dilemmas a betrayed spouse will struggle with as they journey towards healing after a significant betrayal. How do I know I’m not going to get hurt again? How do I know I’m not just being a fool to trust him or her? Trust is so easy to break and so hard to build: today we’d like to give you more insight into the dynamics at play in this important struggle.
Before we talk about indicators of trustworthiness, we’re going to look at factors that are independent of trustworthiness, or a lack thereof, in your spouse, that affect your ability to trust them again.
The Interference of Betrayal Trauma
Betrayal often causes symptoms of trauma to appear. Symptoms of betrayal trauma include:
Avoidance (possibly even as far as terminating your relationship with your spouse)Hypervigilance (fear response) which can involve scrutinizing all of your spouse’s behaviors, searching, researching, double-checking and interrogatingObsessive questioning, meaning that you continually grill your spouse, and may find it hard to stop Rage (fight response)Numbness (freeze response)[1]
Identifying these symptoms isn’t meant to pathologize any of them. It’s just good to be aware of the symptoms so that you can recognize it if you experience betrayal trauma.
Sometimes you can spend a lot of emotional and mental space trying to figure out what happened. Gordon, Baucom and Snyder (2005) note "a primary disruption experienced by the injured partner is intrusive, persistent rumination about the event, which can become so overwhelming and uncontrollable that it interferes with both concentration and daily functioning" (p. 1394).[2] If you’re experiencing symptoms of betrayal trauma, the process is entirely inside because of what the betraying spouse has done. The symptoms of betrayal trauma can protect you from reaching out to your spouse again, even if they’ve returned to a trustworthy place. We’re delicately saying that the symptoms of trauma can prevent you from trusting, even if you are in a situation where it would be safe to trust again.
Part of the impact of trauma is how it affects trust. Gordon, Baucom, and Snyder (2005) go on to observe: "A major cognitive response associated with the discovery of an affair is the change in beliefs about the partner and relationship; one can no longer trust in his or her partner or feel safe within the relationship" (p. 1394).
Trauma affects what you believe about your spouse. Here’s the point: they betrayed you. The betrayal causes trauma. In the ensuing fallout, it is possible that significant cognitive and emotional changes occurred in your spouse so that they are now a trustworthy person. But if your trauma is unresolved and unhealed, the trauma itself will prevent you from seeing, believing and acting on that trustworthiness.
We’re not saying all betraying spouses become trustworthy. Yours may not be. But we are saying that yours may now be, but your trauma prevents you from acknowledging this because it’s protecting you. In conjunction with your spouse doing what is necessary to become a changed, trustworthy person, you also need to take care of this trauma that has occurred.
For betraying spouses listening, it is not for you to turn on your spouse and say this is your fault/problem. A trustworthy betraying spouse can say “yes, I caused this, and I understand that your healing may not follow the same trajectory or speed as mine and you take all the time you need and I will do what I can to support you and I will do what I can to support you.” If they won’t do this, that is a sign that they’re not really trustworthy because they are still blame shifting.
That’s for betrayed spouses to consider as you reflect on yourself. Now, as you reflect on your spouse, we want to give you some warning signs, and some proceed with caution signs. Keep in mind that trust is not a switch that you...
We talked a lot about the 4 predominant styles of attachment in episodes 251 to 254. Attachment is basically the science of love, and in the marriage counseling world, it’s one of the core issues that we’re interested in working on when we are looking at how spouses are relating to one another. As we discussed in previous episodes, there are four styles of attachment, and the best style is called secure attachment. In this episode, we’re going to talk about the five pillars of secure attachment that make up that style of relating to others.
Review of Attachment
For a quick review, attachment is the science of love, or more specifically, the secure emotional bond established between two people (either in a parent to child relationship or in marriage). With a secure attachment style, you can create robust, healthy relationships, and the people in those relationships, your spouse and children, will be best positioned to thrive and grow. A default attachment style is formed within us as a result of the bond during infancy with our primary caregiver (often our mother). Generally, that attachment style becomes the default for how we bond with our spouse through courtship and into marriage.
It is possible to change one’s attachment style, but for 68-75% of the population, the childhood attachment style persists into adulthood[1] and only about 40% of people are securely attached (which is the best style to have). Most people don’t realize that it’s possible to change styles, or that they need to, which is why we want to tackle some of these conceptual topics in today’s episode.
5 Pillars of Attachment
The five pillars of attachment are:
A sense of felt safetyA sense of being seen and known (attunement)The experience of felt comfort (soothing)A sense of being valued (expressed delight)A sense of support for being and becoming one’s unique best self.[2]
We’re going to start each one with how a parent does it for a child and by extension how when a child becomes an adult, they extend that for their spouse, and how they can extend that to their spouse today.
- A Sense of Felt Safety
Parent to Child
Safety comes from consistency, reliability, and protection. Consistency and reliability are about predictability. Are you present and available in a dependable way, when your spouse needs you (or was your parent)? If a parent was unpredictably available, you probably felt you could never be sure so you needed to check in regularly to see. This leads to an anxious attachment style.
If a parent is able to consistently respond to their child’s emotions, needs, and wants, the child will experience a sense of felt safety. On the other hand, if a child grows up in a home where their parent flies off the handle unpredictably, this can lead to an attachment injury even if the parent is always there because the parent is not consistently available. It’s important to note that just because you are unavailable at one particular time does not mean the child will not have a secure attachment style. No parent is perfect, and as long as a parent’s response to their child is understandable and predictable most of the time, then the child will have a sense of felt safety.
Protection is also not helicopter parenting. All children have small injuries such as cuts and bruises; providing a sense of safety does not mean parents need to prevent their children from experiencing any level of pain. Protection does mean taking care of adult concerns without exposing the child to them. Children should not feel responsible for other adult concerns (e.g. financial instability). And of course, parents need to pay attention to adult-level threats such as serious physical hurt, inappropriate sexuality, etc.
A child should always be protected from serious threats such as physical and emotional abuse and neglect. Failed protection means the child develops memories and feelings relative to their primary attachment figure that a...
Today we are going to take a compassionate and sensitive look at the “why” of infidelity. We believe that infidelity is a choice, and, from our own moral perspective, it is wrong, but at the same time when it comes to making sense of infidelity as part of rebuilding a marriage, further examination reveals a lot of complexity and many sensitive topics.
Infidelity Looks Different for Different People
Infidelity is more common than we might think. A 1994 study showed that nearly a quarter of all men and fifteen percent of women engage in sex outside marriage in either a current marriage or previous marriage.[1]
Individuals who commit infidelity can have very different stories. From the perspective of a betraying spouse, some people come in and know how they got derailed. Others come in saying “I don’t know how I got here,” or “I didn’t want this.” There can be a real disconnection from the consequences of their actions.
Factors that Can Contribute to Infidelity
Dissatisfaction with marriage
People who are dissatisfied with their marriages are more likely to seek sexual satisfaction elsewhere than people who are satisfied with their marriages.[2] According to Gerald Weeks, an expert in the field, one of the strongest factors making marital infidelity more likely is diminished marital satisfaction".[3]
This information may bring up questions like “what does this mean for distressed marriages?” “Do all affairs point to a distressed marriage?” “Does this happen to all distressed marriages?” It is certainly not the case that distressed marriages always lead to infidelity. There are some situations where infidelity is a result of diminished judgment and an unexpected opportunity, rather than a sign of distress. For example, if a partner goes on a work trip and has too much alcohol and ends up having a sexual encounter with someone other than their spouse. And not everyone in a distressed marriage will have an affair, many people in distressed marriages are faithful to their spouse. But if your marriage is in distress, it’s best to get help and not just to hope for change without taking action.
Little or No Sexual Intimacy
There have been shown to be higher rates of infidelity when sexual intimacy within the marriage is low in frequency or quality.[4] This is not to say that if you’re not having sex with your spouse that justifies going elsewhere for sexual fulfillment, but a lack of sexual intimacy does increase the temptation. From a Christian perspective, continually withholding sexual intimacy from your spouse is also abandoning one of the privileges of marriage.
Doubts the Marriage Will Last
Individuals are more likely to engage in extramarital sex if they doubt the long-term viability of their marriage. These doubts may lead them to think that the traditional rules regulating marriage no longer apply to them. One can start thinking “because the marriage won’t last, I’m going to seek sexual fulfillment elsewhere.” But once the norm of sexual fidelity is violated, prospects for the continued stability of the marriage are lessened considerably, so this mentality ends up leading to the disintegration of your marriage, regardless of what hope you had for the marriage to begin with.[5]
It’s important to watch for doubts, and what you may entertain based on those doubts about the viability of your marriage. If you find yourself having doubts, try re-visiting your core values. Ask yourself, even if it didn’t last, how you would like the end of the marriage to be remembered? If you’ve been holding off getting help for your marriage, maybe now is the time to do so.
Multiple Sexual Partners Prior to Marriage
Once again, this doesn’t mean that if you’ve had sexual partners prior to your marriage that you will be unfaithful to your spouse. Correlation is not causation. However, statistically individuals who have had numerous past sexual partners prior to the marriage are more likely...
Did you know that the research shows that marriage takes a hit when you have kids? One author reported in 2005 that an analysis of 90 different research studies showed the drop in marital satisfaction is a shocking 42% larger among the current generation than their predecessors. A more recent study from 2016 showed that 67% of couples reported a decline in relationship happiness for up to three years after the birth of their first child.[1] Those figures are reported in non-pandemic situations.
Clearly, parenting does impact marriage for most of us, and parenting during a pandemic presents additional challenges. We want to give you some concrete ways to boost your marriage even while you’re parenting during a pandemic.
How to Prioritize Your Marriage
Instagram and Facebook don’t tell the full story. While we find ourselves posting photos of some pretty sweet moments with our kids, we need to normalize the fact that parenting is very challenging. It makes life more complex and challenging. And those Instagram moments are few and far between. We don’t want to be negative, but we do want to be real. Parenting is hard work.
Recognize the Pressure
High expectations mean lots of social pressure to have your kid excel in one area, if not multiple areas: academically, socially, in sports or athletics, with spiritual values, etc. It’s exhausting and consuming.[2]
As if this wasn’t challenging enough, the compounding problem is that by the time the kids are all launched, the dad and mom hardly know each other and they’ve endured all this stress with little resolution: divorce can become an appealing option.[3]
So how does a couple balance all these demands and not end up in that place? Here are a few ways to help couples find balance.
Have a Daily Stress-Reducing Conversation
Stress often creates overwhelm and emotional reactivity. Having a stress-reducing conversation involves discussing the day’s frustrations, but separating those frustrations from the relationship. Don’t blame all of your frustrations on the relationship when stress is likely the root cause. That gives you both a chance to vent, gain support, and show empathy for one another.[4] This is very important during isolation too.
Spend Time with Just One Another
This is good at any time, but extra tough if you have kids at home right now who are normally at school. Be intentional about making the time for one another. This restores or fosters a sense of partnership so it’s not only about parenting but also what exists between you two.[5] Think about ways you can do this on a daily basis (smaller, consistent moments) but also on an intermittent basis (e.g. date nights). This may look a bit different during a pandemic, but try to find creative ways to spend time just with one another even if you can’t do some of the activities you would normally do together.
In a pandemic context you likely have more time, but it can be harder to make time just for each other if you are home with your kids, so being intentional about creating time is key to prioritizing time with your spouse.
How to Stay Close to Your Spouse When Parenting is Demanding If you feel like you’re several years into raising kids and aren’t exactly sure how to pivot back to putting some focus on your marriage, the bonus guide for today’s episode has a couple of great starting points to help you with that. You can get this by becoming a patron of The Marriage Podcast for Smart People.
Get the Guide!
Discuss Division of Labour
A University of California, Berkeley study tracked 100 couples from first pregnancy through the child's transition to kindergarten found that the No. 1 source of conflict in the first three years of parenthood is the division of labor. According to psychologist Carolyn Page Cowan, the couples had expected a more 50-50 arrangement than they ended up with. The study also showed that when dad doesn't step up,
Reasonably often, we get inquiries from a wife whose husband is addicted to pornography and he won’t do anything about it. In this article we want to help you prepare for that first serious confrontation where you have a very deliberate conversation about this problem and how it is impacting you as his wife.
Understanding Denial
It’s almost inevitable that you are going to run into some level of denial in a conversation like this, so let’s begin by talking about denial. It would be easy to run into this and throw your hands up in the air and give up. However, it is important to understand that denial is a common response to addiction. It is a feature of addiction. And addicts are typically in denial of the negative consequences of their addiction.[1]
One important piece to understand is that the part of the brain that craves or desires something has no direct neural connection to the part of the brain that holds the consequence for engaging in what you desire. One relatable example is a second piece of dessert: the idea of that second piece is always significantly more attractive when you’re about to start into it than the experience of it when you’re through it and starting to feel gross.
If someone were to stop you before that fork bite and say, “No, you should not do this! You’ll feel gross” your automatic response would be, “Get out of my way or you’ll be wearing this fork! I want it anyway!” Now, that is a somewhat trivial example, but it illustrates the power of denial in addiction to the point where a person can ignore the evidence that their choices are harmful.[2]
Nevertheless, it’s still important that the addict is confronted with the consequences of the addiction. We’d just like you to understand that the addict will be in denial and we want to help you prepare so that you can present your evidence, your complaints and concerns in a way that you can motivate him to seek help.
Prepare Yourself First
As we’ve mentioned in other episodes, we are born-again Christians who are not perfect but are trying to live lives that reflect the values of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. All of that to say, we come at this issue with a moral belief that pornography is not helpful to marriage.
We also recognize that we have a lot of listeners who don’t share this belief system and so you’ll approach this issue differently. So, we’re going to offer a range of questions that you should consider as you prepare for this conversation. Depending on your own beliefs and values, some of these questions will be more relevant than others. There are no right or wrong answers to these questions: we just want to think through all that might be going on for you as you approach a confrontation like this with your husband.
Consider your motives for having this conversation:What are you hoping to accomplish?Is it to reassure yourself that you are enough?Are you angry and looking to express this?Is it a conviction against his use of pornography?Consider the basis of your objection:Is it moral?Is it based on general beliefs that you have about pornography?Is it the fact that your spouse is lying or hiding to cover it up?Is it other behaviors that come with the addiction, such as gaslighting?Being clear on exactly what you are objecting to will help you make yourself clear to your spouse.Consider the consequences:What impact has his pornography use had on you?What needs and fears are you carrying into this conversation?Pay attention to what your body has been telling you, what your thoughts have been, what you feel in your heart about pornography and describe its impact on you as thoughtfully and precisely as you can. Your husband needs to know the negative effects this has had on you.[3]Know what you are willing to accept and be prepared to state boundaries that you will consider implementing in order to create emotional and relational safety for yourself.
When Your Husband Wont Face His Pornography Addiction...
Well, we live in unprecedented times as many of us are adjusting to a global crisis. We are recording this episode in the middle of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, with some of our listeners in cities in full lock-down and others nervously awaiting the community spread of this disease. Certainly, it has created considerable stress and new issues to negotiate. Today, we’d like to help you understand how these kinds of crises impact marriage, but more importantly, how your marriage can help you buffer the storm.
How Coronavirus (Or Any Crisis) Affects Marriage
We want to start by normalizing what many are experiencing during this time of crisis. This is a very stressful time. Under this kind of stress, all sorts of issues are going to show up: things related to your family of origin, how you wish to feel supported under duress, communication differences, sexuality issues, attachment, and also loss.
To start with the loss issue, many people have lost the regular rhythm of their normal routines. You may find yourself no longer gathering with colleagues at work every day. If you had kids in school, you’ve lost your quiet time at home and the routines you were accustomed to. You may have lost the ability to gather with your church community, go to the gym, and head to the grocery store without fear. There is a lot of loss all around us even if the coronavirus is not in our neighbourhood. And if it is? There could be tragic loss as well. All of this comes with a lot of stress, so we’ll start by looking at how stress affects your marriage.
Stress Affects Both Spouses
Even if you are not personally as stressed, if your spouse is feeling it, it will bleed over into your experience too. Studies have shown that there is more of a correlation in wives experiencing the stress of their husbands than vice versa.[1] So if your husband is stressed, even if you weren’t, you are going to pick up on that and are likely to have an empathic response. It’s just really hard to get through a time like this untouched by what is going on around you.
You May Disagree on How to Handle the Pandemic
At ordinary times in life, you may disagree about how to handle money or whether to spend holidays with family or away on vacation. Similarly, you can also disagree about how to handle crises like this pandemic.[2]
These disagreements could be related to your family of origin. If your respective family of origin handled crises in different ways, your spouse’s approach to handling the current crisis may be much different from yours. For example, you may believe that this is a time to connect (carefully, and with social distancing) and help one another out as much as possible by sharing resources. But your spouse may feel this is a time to stockpile and hunker down and really protect yourselves and your children. Normal disagreements and differences in the way your family of origin styles tend to show up during a time of crisis.
You Deal with Stress Differently
It may also be that you have very different ways of coping with stress. This will be accentuated right now. One spouse may want to control the situation and take every possible step to ensure safety. That would be more of a doing or busy response — nothing wrong there. But the other spouse may just really need to talk about their fears and anxieties. You can see how it would be easy to have a disconnect: one spouse wondering why the other is not helping with what needs done, and the other just longing to sit down and be able to talk it out.
Naturally, if you don’t take time to communicate with one another, the stress of this crisis can make you feel estranged. So, it is important to pay attention to how the pandemic may be affecting each of you differently and how you respond both respond to it.[3]
Your Attachment Style Impacts Your Stress Response
We have talked about attachment style in past episodes (episode 251-254) and this is relevant when you are under str...
While the disclosure of infidelity is never going to be a happy experience for either the betrayer or the betrayed spouse, you need to know that there are helpful and unhelpful ways to go about it. And the unhelpful ways can make a difficult experience especially damaging for the betrayed spouse. Today, we want to talk about some of the key things you should discuss and the reactions you should be prepared for when disclosing infidelity of any kind.
The Value of Disclosure
It’s very easy to come to a topic like disclosure and wonder if anything positive could possibly come out of it. It is normal to dread an event like this and believe that it is going to cause catastrophic and irreversible damage to your relationship. Those fears may be realized regardless of how well you prepare.
One thing that it’s important to realize is that any damage should only be from the behaviors that you are disclosing, not from the disclosure itself. A thoughtful, caring disclosure may actually end up becoming a first healing step for your spouse if you validate that what they are experiencing is real. It can even begin to restore trust in themselves if there were suspicions or questions about your activities prior to the disclosure.
That’s not to say that the outcome you desire will be achieved or that the difficult feelings of disclosure will be avoided if done right. No, you can still expect the full range of emotions that flow from betrayal.
However, a well thought out, intentional, planned disclosure is going to offer much greater possibilities of repair, recovery and restoration than a careless or forced disclosure.
Discovery or Disclosure?
Let’s define some terms briefly. Discovery is when your spouse finds out some or part of what’s been going on. There are a lot of different ways this can play out. In one scenario, the spouse can find something on her husband’s phone and then challenge him and he may start disclosing immediately. In another scenario, the wife can have suspicions and have all of the lines tapped in their home (in the days before cell phones) and record conversations between her husband and his affair partner for several months before confronting him.
We think it’s fair to make the sweeping statement that a well-prepared disclosure is always better than discovery. One variation on a prepared disclosure is a forced disclosure. That is a situation where, for example, you may have a political candidate who had an affair a few years back and ended that affair and never disclosed it. However, it’s election season and the opposition dug up this information and is about to hit the news with it. In that case, the betraying spouse is forced to urgently disclose the betrayal to their spouse. This is obviously a very difficult situation to be in, not only because of the betrayal itself, but also because of the public exposure tied to it.
Even with that being said, there’s still a lot of variables around disclosure. The recommendations that we want to make is primarily around the more typical forms of infidelity: an affair has occurred, there is a pornography addiction, or there has been some form of financial betrayal.
If you are sex addicted and you need to do a disclosure, this is a much more severe situation that warrants a more carefully planned and thought-out approach than even what we are suggesting today. We have team members with our online counseling agency who can help you with a professionally coordinated disclosure.
Make a Full Disclosure
Another piece of terminology you should be familiar with is “staggered disclosure.” This is where you trickle information to your spouse over a period of days, weeks, or even months. Usually, this happens because the betraying spouse wants to minimize the pain their betrayed spouse feels by delivering the medicine in small doses. However, it does not work and actually has the opposite effect.
The problem with staggered disclosure is that your...
If you are trying to break a pornography addiction, one of the best things you can do is to find a group that you can join in addition to doing individual counselling. Fortunately, there are a number of great options out there to choose from depending on what is available in your area or whether or not you are looking for something that fits with your faith/beliefs or your goals for sobriety. Today, we are looking at 6 of the largest groups available so that you can make a choice about what might work best for your situation.
A number of porn and sex addiction groups came into being in the 1970s, probably in response to the sexual revolution.[1] A number of these groups have been around for a long time and they are well established. But they are not all the same — we’ll try to articulate those differences as we go through so be sure to note what seems to be a good fit for you based on the information we provide about each group. Try to pick a couple because you’ll also want to go on their websites and see if one of them has a group near you.
Group 1: Pure Desire
Website: https://puredesire.org/
About:
Pure Desire Ministries International began in a local church. It was founded by Ted and Diane Roberts. It began as a program to help people with addictions and codependency. Over two decades, they developed a strategy for working with sex addiction that is both Biblically-based, clinically informed, and successful in creating change. In 2007, it became an independent 501c3. It has expanded beyond the church it started in and become internationally known. Their services are available in Canada, the United States, and around the world.
Pure Desire is a Christian organization designed to help men, women and young adults recover from sex addiction and intimacy disorders. They have specific groups for men, women, young men, young women, and college-age men.
Training:
Their counselors also have training through the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction (IITAP) and are licensed as either Certified Sex Addiction Therapists (CSAT) or Pastoral Sex Addiction Professionals (PSAP).
In-Person or Online:
Pure Desire offers both local and online groups. The local groups are volunteer-led and the online groups are led by a Certified Pure Desire Group Leader.
Program:
They have groups both for those struggling with addiction and for those struggling with betrayal. It’s difficult to see what the program is for local groups, but their online groups are a 2 hour-long weekly meeting with 1-2 hours of homework a week. It’s a 10-month long commitment in total.
Fees:
The local, volunteer led groups are free, but the online groups led by one of their leaders are a paid commitment. At the time of this writing, the group for addicts was $490 plus resources (about $60) and the group for betrayed spouses was $290 plus the resources (US Dollars).
Strengths/Weaknesses Compared to Other Groups:
The founder of Pure Desire, Ted Roberts, was working alongside Pat Carnes when he was doing his research and started writing about sex addiction back in the 90’s. It’s very well-grounded clinically as well as Biblically with a lot of experience helping people recover from porn and sex addiction.
Group 2: Celebrate Recovery
Websites:
https://www.celebraterecovery.com/ (Around the world)https://www.celebraterecovery.ca/ (Canada)
About:
Celebrate Recovery offers a faith-based 12 step program. They began in 1991 at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California when John Baker wrote a letter to Rick Warren, the senior pastor outlining the vision God had given him for starting Celebrate Recovery. John is still the primary author of the Celebrate Recovery curriculum and materials. Though it has Christian affiliation and a biblical approach to addictions treatment, more than 70% of their members come from outside the church.
Celebrate Recovery began with just four Open Share Groups and has expande...
If you have betrayed your spouse and disclosed that betrayal to them, one thing you will have become very aware of is the rage that betrayal can cause. In our experience in working with couples, many people who are working through their own infidelity and trying to recover their marriage find that they aren’t sure how to respond to this rage or what to do with it.
Today we are going to look at why anger is a normal part of responding to betrayal, where it comes from, and how to best support your spouse in the face of it.
Anger Is A Common Reaction to Betrayal
When a person is betrayed, there are a lot of potential responses that often come in waves and in varying degrees of intensity. According to researcher MeowLan Chan (2009) "Typical responses to betrayal include: retaliation, reduction in trust, distrust or suspicion, increase in monitoring, negative emotions (e.g., anger, disappointment, frustration), deterioration in the quality or even termination of the relationship, withdrawal of effort and cooperation within the relationship, and demand for more legalistic forms of trust as substitutes for interpersonal trust."[1] These reactions affect both your spouse and your relationship.
One of the most prominent negative emotions is anger, or even rage. In all fairness, when anyone is faced with an extreme threat they will often respond with anger. Anger helps a person survive by shifting their focus toward doing the things necessary for survival.
Since a marriage is usually grounded on what was seen to be a reliable foundation of trust, when that foundation is shattered by betrayal, this significant breakdown in one’s foundation is often experienced as a threat to survival. Furthermore, anger is a common response to events that seem unfair or to circumstances that set you up to be a victim of the choices of others, especially a situation like a betrayal event.[2]
Understanding Trauma and PTSD from Betrayal
The severity of a spouse’s response to betrayal can come as a surprise to the betraying spouse. Often, a betraying spouse wants to justify their actions and the way they may have gone against their values with those actions. They do this by denying and minimizing their actions in their mind. As a result, they tend to mentally turn the dial down on what the anticipated consequences will be.
Regardless of how much denial is occurring, it does not affect the severity of the impact on the betrayed spouse. Quite often, a betrayal becomes a traumatic event, even causing many of the symptoms of PTSD. Your spouse may experience other negative effects of trauma such as forgetting important parts of the traumatic event, exaggerating negative thoughts about oneself, others, or the world, distorted blame of self or others, detachment or estrangement from others, inability to experience positive emotions, lack of interest in activities, or globally negative experiences of fear, horror, anger, guilt, or shame.[3] This is all due to the trauma that frequently comes with betrayal. It’s such a blow to a person that it becomes a shattering event.
Looking at the rage response more specifically, some of the criteria for rage include:
Having an experience that exceeds healthy anger.Losing the rational component of brain functioning that enables a person to think clearly and logically. Losing the ability to consider consequences for actions.Even seeking to hurt your spouse in a physical way.
It should be noted that these particular features of rage were observed in a study of violent women who experienced rage towards their partner, but not in a betrayal context.[4] However, we hear about betrayed spouses experiencing the same symptoms when they have experienced spousal betrayal. It’s important to note that even when you have been betrayed, it is still not acceptable to resort to physical violence. Yes, it’s also unacceptable to be betrayed, but two wrongs won’t make a right and physical violence wo...
Compassion is probably something that you find harder to provide for yourself than for others. However, did you know that self-compassion can help your marriage? Yes, we often talk about what you could and should give to your spouse in marriage, but today we want to talk about the need for self-compassion and how beneficial that can be both for yourself and for your marriage.
In Western culture, compassion is most commonly thought of as something that should be extended to others. In fact, most of what you will read nowadays about self-compassion finds its roots in Buddhist traditions where compassion to oneself is considered to be as important as one’s compassion to others.
At OnlyYouForever, we operate out of a Christian worldview, and we think we can very easily point to a Biblical basis for self-compassion in the second greatest commandment that the Lord Jesus stated: love your neighbor as yourself. That little phrase, “as yourself” is the justification for taking a serious interest in self-compassion because your love for your neighbor (or your spouse!) is going to be based on this.
What is Self-Compassion
Self-compassion was first defined by psychologist Kristin Neff and she described it as “Kindness toward the self, which entails being gentle, supportive and understanding.”[1] So rather than harshly judging oneself for personal shortcomings, one offers oneself warmth and unconditional acceptance.
The reason why this subject is worth addressing is that a growing body of research suggests that self-compassion is strongly associated with psychological health, and less anxiety and depression.[2] As well, Self-compassion is negatively correlated with depression, anxiety, and perfectionism, and is positively correlated with life satisfaction.[3] Research also indicates that self-compassion is associated with better emotional coping skills, greater ability to repair negative emotional states, and generally a more positive state of being.[4] You can imagine how those things can all benefit marriage as well.
How Self-Compassion Can Benefit Your Marriage
A recent study from 2018 looked at the effects of self-compassion on romantic relationships.[5] The students involved in the study who reported higher levels of self-compassion tended to report having higher quality romantic relationships. Now, one of the limitations of the study was that it was done on young people in romantic relationships who were in undergraduate students in university. Nevertheless, the results are worth considering for anyone in a romantic relationship/marriage.
So, why does self-compassion lead to greater satisfaction in relationships? One reason is that people with higher self-compassion are more aware of and able to meet their own needs for kindness and self-comfort. In a distressed marriage, a lot of the focus goes toward figuring out what your spouse needs so this may be a little counterintuitive. But, the ability to balance independence with connectedness, which is being able to observe and respond to your own needs as well as to your spouse’s, is important for healthy relationships.
Another reason that individuals with high levels of self-compassion have stronger conflict resolution abilities is that self-compassion gives you more of an ability to see their spouse’s point of view during the disagreement as part of your common humanity rather than a personal hardship that is happening to you. In essence, it means you can love your spouse as yourself while in conflict. That’s a very powerful skill to have when working through conflict.[6]
When to Use Self-Compassion
Of course, with self-compassion one might simply say “use it everywhere,” but here are a few specific examples to consider.
Compassion can be extended toward yourself when suffering occurs through no fault of your own, such as when the external circumstances of life are simply painful or difficult to bear.[7] For example,
The thought of disclosing an affair to your spouse can be quite terrifying. You know that it is going to cause a lot of distress, perhaps even profound distress, and you also know that you do not really have control over the outcome of your disclosure.
While no disclosure is ever going to be a positive experience, our experience working with couples over many years has shown that there are some helpful and some very unhelpful ways to disclose infidelity. We want to help you prepare as well as possible to disclose a betrayal to your spouse.
Disclosure is Important
If you have broken a promise of faithfulness or fidelity to your spouse and have not told them, then you are facing the need to disclose this betrayal or infidelity. Infidelity can be a number of different things. It can be a purely emotional (and sometimes romantic) relationship with someone of the opposite sex, an online relationship (or relationships), viewing pornography, a one-time or ongoing sexual relationship outside the marriage, or a financial betrayal (e.g., hidden gambling debt or purchasing something significant without disclosing it).
Although it is very difficult to disclose an affair, the research shows that individuals who do disclose acknowledge that in the end it was a challenging but correct decision to make.[1]
We do want to mention that if you are realizing that you are sex addicted and have an extensive double life to disclose to your spouse, there are professionals who specialize in helping with this kind of disclosure. In this article, we’re mainly focused on the disclosure of an affair, although some of the principles will apply to other betrayals as well. We just want to note that for sex addiction, the process is much more deliberate and planned because of the extent of what must be disclosed and how traumatic that typically is for the betrayed spouse.
Avoid These Things When Disclosing Infidelity
It is important to be fully honest. You definitely want to avoid lying while disclosing the truth. That may sound funny to say, but sometimes people think they can ease the blow by reducing the overall truthfulness of the disclosure. When those lies get discovered, even the truth is called into question at that point.
There are several things to avoid, but we’re assuming that you, as the reader, have the goal of becoming radically honest with your spouse as a result of engaging in this disclosure.
Avoid Excessive Detail
First of all, every spouse varies in how much they want to know about the infidelity. Some want to know very little. Others want to know what the infidelity was and who it was with, and others want to know all the details even down into the exact play-by-play intricacies of the extramarital sexual encounters.
While it is important for your spouse to know the truth, it is also important not to give too much detail as this will greatly increase the traumatic blow of the disclosure.[2] When too much is disclosed, we hear a lot of betrayed spouses talking about flashbacks and scenes playing like a movie in their mind even though they did not see the event.
We do recommend in cases of infidelity that the betrayed spouse know who the affair partner(s) was, where they met, when they met, and what happened (e.g., whether the trysts involved intimate conversations or if they involved sexual intercourse, etc.). Those facts help the betrayed spouse to understand the pattern and extent of the extra-marital behaviours so that they can be aware of the signs of the behavior.
Now, if your spouse wants extensive detail (sexual positions, what she was wearing, your exact thoughts at different points, etc.) you have to be careful not to appear to be hiding or minimizing what happened. A thoughtful response is really important. We recommend that you tell your spouse you are not entirely opposed to sharing all of the details, nor do you wish to continue any form of hiding or dishonesty,
If you ever find yourself feeling overwhelmed during conflict, then this article is for you. We describe the psychological experience of flooding: when you white out or shut down or get hijacked by your own emotions. Usually, this happens during a fight with your spouse and it never helps resolve the issue you’re facing. In this article, we talk about what flooding is and how you can calm yourself down in order to navigate through conflict more successfully.
What is Flooding?
This is a problem that marriage researchers have been paying attention to since the 1990’s when Dr. Gottman first began describing it. It’s a common experience — typically for the withdrawer in marriage, and, since the husband is most commonly the withdrawer in a pursue-withdraw cycle, it happens the most to men. Of course, there are some wives who experience it too.
Gottman defines flooding as "the subjective sense of being overwhelmed by the partner’s negative affect, finding it to be unexpected and intense, and feeling as though one’s information processing is impaired.”[1] In other words, in the face of your intense anger or upset I get overwhelmed and shut down. Flooding is not an emotion in itself. It’s just the experience of becoming overwhelmed and feeling like your thoughts are disorganized and you don’t know how to respond.[2]
How to Recognize Flooding
The more obvious signs of flooding to watch for are just that sense of being overstimulated, feeling that you are overwhelmed, and mentally disorganized.[3] It will typically prompt a fight or flight response in you so that you will want to either respond with anger or withdraw from the situation. About 80% of husbands will stonewall in this situation[4] which looks like emotional withdrawal (shutting down) and sometimes physical withdrawal (e.g., heading to the garage) as well.
The less obvious signs of flooding are much like an intense stress response. These signs may include: increased respiration, an increased heart rate, an increase in blood pressure and perspiration. At the same time, you may notice yourself starting to have very negative or catastrophic thoughts about the relationship, for example thinking that “this is never going to work” or feeling very hopeless.
Impact of Flooding
It’s also important to notice that flooding may really compel you to want to put a stop to the situation that caused or prompted the flooding. In other words, you’ll want to shut down the argument or end the conflict, almost at any cost. It’s like you are driven to escape the situation.[5]
The really difficult thing about flooding is that while it is something that happens to you during conflict (nobody does this intentionally to themselves) it is almost universally interpreted as you doing something to or against them! So, the more withdrawn you get as you feel overwhelmed, the more your spouse is likely to turn up the volume. In actual fact, as a result of the flooding, you may even be unable to hear what your spouse is saying.[6]
This inability to hear your spouse is a key part of the cycle that we unpack and unravel with our marriage counseling clients as we help them find new ways to navigate conflict. In this article, we are going to talk about why this happens and how to calm yourself down.
How to Reduce Flooding During Conflict Once again, we’ve created a bonus guide for our much appreciated supporters. We’ve got a PDF download that shows you how to practice self-compassion as a way to reduce flooding during conflict. This exercise is an effective approach to helping you navigate conflict more successfully. You can get this by becoming a patron of The Marriage Podcast for Smart People.
Get the Guide!
Why Do I Flood?
You may be wondering, why does this happen to me? Or perhaps it is your spouse that gets flooded and you’re asking yourself, “Why does he do that?” It’s important to be aware of this because as the intensity of conflict increases,
If you are married, it’s more than likely that you’ve had a discussion with your spouse at some point about a friendship between one of you and someone outside your marriage. So, what about those opposite-sex friendships? Are they healthy or are they dangerous? Should we avoid them at all costs or take them on a case by case basis? How much friendliness with the opposite sex is too much and could land you in trouble? What if the person you’re friends with is 50 years older than you? These are all questions we explore in this article.
Recognize the Hazard
First of all, we don’t take a hard line on this issue in either direction. We neither tell you to back off and let your spouse be a grown-up and choose his or her friends or insist that there can be no friendships with the opposite sex for either of you.
This is a nuanced issue with lots of variables and we want to point you towards a thoughtful, nuanced, self-reflective review of this issue. Hopefully, you do this in a way that prioritizes the sanctity and value of being in a loyal, committed, thriving marriage.
It’s important to recognize that we all need to recognize there is a potential hazard in opposite sex friendships. This doesn’t just apply to flirtatious friends; it’s is really true with any friend. If someone is your friend, it is because you are attracted to them: to their personality or characteristics or physical appearance or what they have to offer or how they make you feel. The word “attraction” may make you nervous there: it doesn’t necessarily mean physical attraction or even attraction in a way that is unfaithful to your marriage. It’s natural that we like our friends. You may not be thinking in that direction today, but it is important to acknowledge this as a potential hazard. That doesn’t call us to paranoia or isolation: it should call us toward caution and self-reflection to make sure we keep things in a healthy place.
What to Watch For
The Potential for More
The first issue to be aware of is that there is often the potential for more than a friendship. There are conceivable circumstances under which a friendship could exist with absolutely no sexual attraction or sexual compatibility. In a case like this, having a friendship with someone of the opposite gender presents no problem at all.[1] An example of this is little old ladies from church. You can go to her house for the afternoon, chat, share personal stories, have a cup of tea, pet her cat, and nothing is ever going to happen.
At the same time, it’s important to realize that many opposite-sex friendships involve people who—if circumstances were different—might be potential romantic partners. It’s also worth noting that it is common for men to mainly befriend women that they have at least some degree of physical attraction to.[2] In light of this, it can be hard to know how best to handle opposite-sex relationships because another important task for married people is to stop considering alternatives. You don’t want to be moving through life considering potential alternatives to your spouse. But you also have to recognize that if someone is a potential alternative then that friendship has greater risks associated with it.
The key difference between these two thoughts is the element of fantasy. Fantasy says, “I wonder what it would be like to be married to him or her?” Or worse, “…To have sex with that person?” This is called considering alternatives, and it erodes your commitment, intimacy, and loyalty towards your spouse.
On the other hand, it is possible to realize that someone is attractive or kind or admirable in some way. You need to be conscious of recognizing that there is potential for more (without fantasy or thinking about what that potential might be) and just set a mental boundary for yourself.
Warning Sings
It’s important to pay attention to the warning signs and not to ignore them. Some warning signs might be:
Four episodes back we addressed the topic of pain during sex for women and that show received a lot of downloads. Today we return to the topic but this time for men. Sexual issues like this can be difficult to figure out and often people just don’t even know who to ask, so they struggle alone. We hope this will be the start of getting help for anyone who is struggling with pain during sex so that you can return to enjoying physical intimacy with your wife.
Pain During Sex for Men
Often, the cause of pain during sex can by physical, psychological or a mixture of both. Generally, you’ll want to start by addressing this problem with your family doctor to see if there is a medical cause. You may also find help with a referral to a psychiatrist, counselor or sexologist in order to work through the causes and find a solution that works well.
If you’re going to talk to your doctor, it helps to go prepared with the information you need. Men can experience pain during erection or ejaculation or post-erection or post-ejaculation.[1] Often, because we feel awkward about the topic, we don’t really think carefully and precisely about the timing of the pain, but do keep this in mind so you can assist your doctor in helping you. Also, sometimes the pain will come with other problems such as erectile dysfunction, though this may be a symptom of another problem rather than the primary cause of the pain.
It’s good to note that there are some common lifestyle changes that can help with this issue of pain as well: exercising, eating well, limiting your alcohol consumption and quitting smoking can all help reduce sexual problems for men.[2]
Basic Sources of Pain
We are going to speak about some more complex causes of pain. But I think it’s worth noting that just the friction of sex can irritate the skin on your penis if your spouse is not sufficiently lubricated. Using a quality lubricant is the solution for this problem.
It’s also helpful to note that there’s a connection between sex drive and pain. Low sex drive does not necessarily cause pain, but pain during sex may cause low sex drive.
Finally, we’re not going through an extensive list of sexually transmitted infections or diseases but it should be noted that STIs such as herpes or untreated gonorrhea can cause burning, itching, or sores, bumps, or blisters in the genital area (treatment is similar for men and women).[3]
Common Causes of Pain During Sex
There are a number of other causes of pain during sex, some of which are not as well-known.
Delayed Ejaculation
Delayed ejaculation is characterized by taking more than 30 minutes to ejaculate during sex, or in some cases, not ejaculating at all. Depending on what’s happening, this can either be caused by pain or result in pain. It’s hard to distinguish cause and effect: there could be a minor physical issue that results in the delayed ejaculation. Or the delayed ejaculation may be the by-product of a medication and then the pain comes from irritation, for example, from friction due to the extended duration of intercourse.
If you’re facing this issue, you should consider causes such as anxiety and stress, or medications such as antidepressants or hair loss treatments. There could also be a prostate or urinary tract infection, a hormone imbalance, possible birth defects, or pelvic or spinal nerve damage.[4]
You’ll definitely want to start with your doctor on this one. Your doctor can help you figure out the underlying issues and recommend treatment. In the meantime, use plenty of lubricant and it’s also helpful sometimes to just remind yourself to take the focus off achieving orgasm and, instead, really enjoy being with your spouse.[5]
Persistent Pelvic Floor Muscle Spasms
Sometimes the muscles in the pelvic floor stop working properly. These are muscles that extend from your pubic bone at the front, back to the base of your spine.[6] One problem that can occur is pelvic floor muscle spas...
The purpose of today’s episode is simply to act as an eye-opener. In our online counseling agency, we help a lot of men break their pornography addiction. One common theme is that many of them are surprised by how devastated their wife is by their pornography use. It’s like they really don’t anticipate the impact: most think she’ll be mad, but the hurt often surprises them. So the goal with discussing this topic is to educate husbands so that they can be better prepared to understand and respond to their wife’s distress.
Pornography Use is Common
Let’s start on the more general end of things. Porn use continues to increase: a 2018 article in the Journal of Sex Research indicated that half of men are exposed to pornography prior to the age of 13, nearly all men use it occasionally for masturbation, and roughly 46% use pornography weekly. In contrast, only 16–31% of women report regularly using pornography.[1]
Pornography Use Affects Your View of Sex
When people view pornography, they may not really realize it, but they are learning about sex. So the viewing impacts how they think and what they believe about the human sexual experience. Pornography is a very intense medium where you are generally seeing people with unrealistic and uncommon physical attributes, and videography or photoshopping of images to idealize and intensify the sexual experience. The consequence of this is that you will start to feel the romantic and sexual aspects of your marriage are just inadequate. This means that your marriage relationship is going to deteriorate. This is through no fault of the marriage itself or your wife.
Pornography is Highly Addictive
It seems like something you could figure out, but it isn’t. It’s like when you go into a major fast food chain and you see that juicy burger with a perfect, fluffy bun, and the lettuce and sauce all decked out in a pristine form — you know that the burger you get is going to look nothing like that. But you still buy the burger. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way in marriage — probably because the brain circuitry and addictive components are far more powerful in human sexuality and relationships than they are with how you relate to fast food.
The idea that a little porn use doesn’t hurt anybody is unrealistic. Another study that took a nationally representative sample (in the USA) of over 20,000 married people found that "those who reported seeing an X-rated movie in the last year were 12% less likely to have a happy marriage, 25% more likely to be previously divorced, and 10% more likely to have had an extramarital affair." Another interesting stat is that a survey of attorneys found that 56% of divorce cases involved heightened use of internet pornography by one partner.[2] Research shows that pornography use definitely poses a threat to a happy, healthy marriage.
Pornography Decreases Intimacy
The act of secretly using pornography, hiding it, and feeling guilty about it, may make the other partner feel inadequate and that the user is emotionally withdrawn from his or her partner even if the partner is not aware of the addiction. This can also lead to sexual dysfunction and deteriorated emotional intimacy.[3]
Negative Effects of a Husband’s Pornography Use on Wives
First of all, a lot of men are likely to expect that their wife will be angry when she discovers he has been using porn. Very angry. But many men have not really thought about how traumatic it will be for her.
Upon discovering their husband’s porn use, women often experience symptoms of relational trauma, including fear and/or anxiety, outbursts of anger, intrusive thoughts of the trauma, feelings of self-blame or responsibility, feelings of panic or feeling out of control, sadness or depression, feelings of detachment, feelings of worthlessness or being broken, preoccupation with body image, difficulty falling or staying asleep, hyper-vigilance (being constantly on the alert for signs that y...
What do you do when you’re going to see family for the holidays or on a vacation and you know that not everybody is in that healthy place where they’re going to be able to show you, your spouse and kids respect and care? So many of our listeners — if they want to spend time with family — know ahead of time that it’s not likely to go well. How can we prepare and protect ourselves when this is the case?
For many people, family visits are a time to look forward to where you enjoy spending time with your family. But for many people, they would have at least some concern about one of their parents or family members making part of the time difficult or uncomfortable. And I know there are other folks where they feel an obligation to honor their parents by visiting them but also know that there are going to be some legitimate hardships during that visit.
Signs of a Toxic Relationship
Let’s start by just looking at the signs of a toxic relationship. If you are put down a lot or if you experience passive-aggressive behaviors or comments from a family member then that’s evidence of a toxic relationship.[1] For example, they may bring something up out of the blue like “why did you not invite me to that movie you went to?” Or they may tell your wife something that they want you to hear, but not have the courage to confront you directly.
Another sign of toxicity is if you find the person consistently attempting to cross boundaries that you have set. When this happens, you may withdraw or feel anxious or uncomfortable but perhaps not really recognizing why. If you notice this reaction in yourself, it may be because one of your boundaries has been crossed.[2]
We’ll talk more about setting boundaries later on, but the reality is that many people, despite having difficult family members, feel that they should continue to make visits or spend time with difficult, sarcastic, narcissistic, ill-mannered, or toxic family members. What’s the best way to handle that reality?
Ways to Handle Difficult Family Visits
- Prepare Beforehand
If you know you're going to a family gathering and you have a difficult relationship with one or more family members, practice self-care before going on the visit. Sleep and good nutrition can help you feel good, and help you be in a positive frame of mind before meeting family members.[3]
It’s also a good idea to get on the same page with your spouse. If there are predictable patterns of behavior that you’ll be facing, what do you want to ignore or tolerate, and what are behaviors that one or both of you would consider severe enough to confront? What are your shared boundaries that you both agree to? What are your absolute no-zones? The question here is how can you face this as a team? And support and maintain connection with one another in the face of these challenges?
- Do What You Can to Work With the Relationship
It doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves that some toxic relationships can become healthy. Sometimes people just go through a phase or even just slip into a way of relating to us that isn’t really a true reflection of their deeper values.
If this is the case, accountability may be prudent. You might decide that you want to gently call them out if they are being passive-aggressive and let them know how this kind of behavior is hurtful to you. At the same time, you may wish to acknowledge their feelings, saying things like “I didn’t know you were upset about that.”[4]
It’s good to remember that, typically, remaining silent or else trash-talking the person to your spouse doesn’t really help them to grow. And it may be worth confronting some of these behaviors to see if the person is willing and able to respond.
If you find that your spouse does not respond, then it may be time to set some healthy boundaries until the person is in a place where they can relate to you with some basic elements of respect and care. Just be sure to be thoughtful and not judgmental.
Is your spouse taking you for granted? Well, you may be expecting us to pick on that nasty spouse of yours: but as we often point out, the only person you can change is yourself. Today we’re going to look at how a people pleasing personality or a codependent personality can lead you to feeling very much taken for granted, and what to do about it.
There can be a number of reasons why you may be feeling that you are being taken for granted by your spouse. I think all of us go through at least brief phases in our marriage when we feel that way. Often this comes up around the issues of fair distribution of household labour or emotional labour. If you think that this may be a shorter-term imbalance, those two episodes/articles are definitely worth checking out.
On the other hand, feeling taken for granted may be due to relationship or personality dynamics in yourself. That’s what we want to consider today as another possible explanation for how you arrived at a place where you’re feeling very taken for granted.
First of all, we want to consider marital roles and then two personality dynamics: the people pleasing personality and codependency as two possible explanations.
Codependency and people-pleasing are two tendencies that can make you more easily taken for granted by others, including your spouse. These tendencies are not the same thing. Someone is usually one or the other, though there are times when a person displays some of the attitudes of both codependency and people-pleasing.[1]
Roles in Marriage
Sometimes couples have a more traditional view of marriage: the husband makes a lot of the decisions and the wife is supportive of the husband. This isn't a bad thing as long as it's agreeable to both spouses, but you want to be sure that the arrangement is considered to be fair by both spouses, and especially that the wife's needs and wants are not overlooked in the relationship.
The dominant vision of marriage in the twentieth-century was created during the interwar years. Before this period, husbands and wives were seen to represent complementary but separate natures and existences. Today, couples with a less traditional view of marriage generally negotiate household arrangements in a more "fluid and individualized fashion" than their parents’ generation had.”[2]
While old norms were based on separate spheres and an elevated appreciation for female self-sacrifice, modern norms are based on comradeship and self-expression.[3] For example, it's more common in modern marriages for the wife to contribute financially to the family than it was in previous generations.[4]
A woman’s role in marriage was more set with the old norms, whereas women who adopt more modern norms have more expectations to manage than men because of the way things have changed. They need to "mediate tensions between experimentation and stability--between the old norms based on separate spheres and female self-sacrifice and new norms of comradeship and self-expression” in order to find a healthy balance.[5]
In marriages with a more traditional view of the husband and wife role, it can be easy to set up the expectation that the wife will always be willing to sacrifice her own needs and wants for those of her husband, and will always be supportive of what he does at the expense of her own needs and wants.
Having a traditional model certainly doesn’t always lead to the wife feeling taken for granted. But this model does set the stage for that possibility.
In any marriage, regardless of whether or not the wife is working or not, it's important for there to be space for her own individual self-expression, as well as room to connect to one another as peers. This requires creating space for one another's thoughts and feelings. For husbands, it means not dominating or controlling your wife and allowing her space to have her own voice.
The People Pleasing Personality
A brief definition of a people pleasing personality is...
If you experience pain during sex, you are certainly not alone. Pain during sex is called dyspareunia, and research shows that about 7% of women experience pain it.[1] Of those 7%, about one-quarter of them reported that the pain had been occurring frequently or every time they had intercourse over at least 6 months. Today, we’d like to look at some of the most common causes so that if you’re experiencing dyspareunia you maybe have a starting point to know how to explore and hopefully resolve this challenge.
Pain during sexual intercourse is a relatively common issue. Of course, the lifetime prevalence is going to be higher, and I would expect that every person is likely to have at least some discomfort if not some pain during the course of their sexual interactions with their spouse over the lifetime of their marriage. This can be tough to talk about for some people, so we hope that today’s show serves as a bit of an icebreaker and introduction to the subject.
We’re not sexologists, sex therapists or medical professionals. I am a marriage counselor so we do address sexual issues, but just be reminded that if you are experiencing pain your wisest course of action is first of all to talk to your doctor or gynaecologist, and possibly to book an appointment with a sex therapist.
There are more reasons for pain during sex than what we will cover, for example, we are not going to address urinary tract infections or sexually transmitted infections. But anxiety and menopause are two major causes so we’ll start with them.
Sexual Anxiety
Sexual anxiety (or sexual performance anxiety) is something that affects men and women of all ages, regardless of how much experience they have had with sexual intercourse. There are a variety of possibilities here. A newly married wife may be too self-conscious to tell her husband what she does not enjoy: this could lead to some trepidation or anxiety about having sex which could result in pain during sex.[2] In some cases, the anxiety may be short-lived and go away on its own. In other cases, it may be something that occurs on a regular basis and interferes with a healthy sex life.[3]
According to sex educator Amy Jo Goddard (n.d.), two things are generally the root cause of sexual performance anxiety. She states, "this response is conditioned by the way in which we were brought up to think about certain aspects of sex and our own bodies, and by social expectations that impact our relationship with our own sexuality."[4] This means that messages from your family of origin, your church, or from locker-room discussions or friends at school — all those sources could potentially contribute to anxiety during sex.
Other times it may simply be a lack of sex education: perhaps not that you don’t understand how sex works, but that you’re just not prepared for all the realities of sexual encounters with your husband. Everyone functions differently and has different needs when it comes to sex, and not being well educated can lead you to feel unsure about the techniques of giving, achieving or receiving pleasure. Additionally, you may experience fear because of myths concerning pregnancy, or myths about how your body is supposed to react during sex, and these beliefs can be very anxiety-inducing.[5]
Of course, anxiety impacts arousal, which impacts your body’s ability to prepare itself for penetration and intercourse. It’s also important to note that the anxiety doesn’t have to be sexual performance anxiety. It could be anxiety about anything: how you’re going to pay the bills, your child’s health, the family get-together that’s coming up, whatever. General anxiety can also impact your sexual experience, potentially resulting in discomfort or pain.
What to do About Anxiety
Obviously, with such a wide variety of potential sources for anxiety it is challenging to cover all the possible solutions. If your anxiety is more generalized then taking care of that anxiety may just as...
Back in episode 209, we did a show on the five things you need to know if you’ve been betrayed by your husband. Today we want to look at the experience of a husband who has been betrayed. Men and women both experience betrayal, but have different ways of responding to it.
Betrayal trauma is the result of a shocking disclosure of a relational breach, whether that’s unfaithfulness or some other form of broken trust or loss of confidence in your marriage. These breaches can come from things like spousal neglect, cheating or various forms of infidelity, dishonesty, deception, betrayal, rejection, or other circumstances that cause you to stop trusting your spouse.[1]
Men Process Betrayal Trauma Differently Than Women
Unfortunately, there is much less research on men dealing with betrayal trauma than on women. Men definitely experience pain and have to go through a process of healing after they are betrayed, but they tend to process it differently than women. According to Douglas Weiss (2019), a psychologist who sees both women and men dealing with betrayal trauma, men tend to compartmentalize more than women and they tend to block out painful experiences such as betrayal.[2]
Research shows that men tend to go in one of two directions when dealing with infidelity: either they divorce their spouse or they give them one more chance.[3] Women are actually more likely to experience symptoms of trauma and PTSD after betrayal, whereas men don’t end up with the same PTSD symptoms. Keep in mind that this is a general statement. There are men who do experience trauma and PTSD symptoms after betrayal. They also should look for professional help, grieve what has happened, and deal with the hurt, anger and betrayal that they’ve endured.[4]
Betrayal can Have Lasting Effects
Just because you have not developed symptoms of PTSD, this does not necessarily mean you are free and clear of any lasting effects. Even without adverse ongoing symptoms, you still have to take time to process the hurt, anger and betrayal. You have to grieve the loss of an unadulterated marriage and other effects of what has happened.
There are some feelings that betrayed men experience that are common to both genders. For example, shame. It could be shame of believing that others will see them as sexually incompetent, thus prompting their spouse to go outside the marriage. It could also be believing that they are relationally or emotionally inadequate, again prompting the spouse to seek to meet their needs outside the marriage. However, where other women will typically rally around one of their own when betrayed, a man in the same situation may find himself with friends who don’t know how to support him in this very vulnerable and emotionally raw stage after he discloses the affair to them.
Finally, it’s always helpful to remember that everyone processes betrayal differently. And every kind of betrayal is different. For example, a financial betrayal (e.g., a hidden gambling loss) will prompt a very different reaction than the discovery of an affair.
One thing both genders need to do is to consider, process and express the emotions generated by the betrayal. If you have friends, a mentor, or someone in your support network who can be there with you as you do this work, that is a huge help. It’s also a good idea to reach out to your therapist for counseling. If you haven’t worked with a therapist before we have a number of our team members at OnlyYouForever who work with betrayal situations in marriage too.
5 Ways To Heal From Betrayal
We’d like to give you the five things you can do to help you recover from a betrayal.
- Give Yourself Time
It’s important to understand that there is no quick fix to a situation like this. Recovery from betrayal is a painful process. It takes time to heal.
It is totally normal during this time to feel anger and distress. It’s normal to be fine one moment and ambushed by emotions the next.
Physical touch is an important way to keep the emotions of love alive in your marriage. It is one of the first senses we develop as humans and is a primary component of intimacy in adult romance. Unfortunately, it’s something we can forget about, be turned off towards, or start to associate with difficult memories or experiences. Today, we want to look into the research on physical touch to see the benefits of it and learn how we can rekindle it in marriage.
Touch Matters
Social touch is essential for normal human development and for the development of attachment during intimacy. We talked about attachment in episodes 251 to 254: it’s the development of a loving, secure bond between two people. There is a large body of research literature on the beneficial effects of touch (typically mother-infant) for attachment and soothing during infancy and in that very important infant-caregiver relationship.[1]
There’s also a lot of research on the benefits of physical touch in marriage, and we want to talk about touch in that context. We’re talking about the kind of affection that includes “any touch intended to arouse feelings of love in the giver and/or the recipient.”[2] And while we are using the word “arouse” in that definition, loving touch can be either non-sexual or sexual. Really, both are important. Another research article we looked at helpfully pointed out that, “Ideally, the touch is appropriate to the setting, does not interfere with goal-directed behavior, and is not oriented toward immediate sexual gratification.”[3]
When is Touch Appropriate?
Touch that is appropriate to the setting means that you are not touching your spouse sexually in a public place, in front of family, etc. That kind of touch can be loving, but is appropriate only in some contexts. Most couples will understand that intuitively.
Physical touch should also not interfere with goal-directed behavior, meaning that it’s not intrusive. It should never involve holding or restraining your partner when they’re trying to do something else. Affectionate touch should not be controlling or interfering even if it is intended to be warm. Furthermore, it should not interfere with safety. For example, you shouldn’t attempt to hold your partner’s hand while they are driving during a snowstorm and need both hands on the steering wheel. Touch should always be respectful — this should not take away from spontaneity completely, but there are times that respect and safety should come before spontaneity.
Finally, physical touch should not simply be “oriented toward immediate sexual gratification.” There is certainly a place and time for sexual touch in a healthy marriage, and there is a place for touching your spouse in a way that invites sexual initiation or invitation. At the same time, if every time you touch your spouse you are really just approaching your spouse sexually with little or no loving non-sexual touch, and this is a regular it is likely that you will leave your spouse feeling objectified like you are only touching them for sexual gratification. Something to be handled or groped. That’s not intimate, respectful or nurturing.
Touch Is a Love Language
Touch is one of the love languages articulated by Chapman in his book, The Five Love Languages.[4] If you feel this is one of your love languages or your spouse’s, then tender touch is very important.
For some husbands, when they heard the words “physical touch” they immediately think of sex. But think of sex as just one dialect of this love language: holding hands, brief kisses, hugging, back rubs, an arm around the shoulder… these are all ways of expressing love by non-sexual physical touch.
Some forms of touch may be explicit and call for your full attention. For example, a back rub or foot massage from your spouse. Naturally, sexual foreplay calls for your full attention. But other kinds of touch may only require a moment and can be part of other activities,
Transitioning from full-time employment into retirement is naturally going to impact both your life and your marriage. Retirement comes with lots of changes, and there are ups and downs to the process. Whether you have parents going through this, you’re coming up to retirement, or you have recently retired, there’s lots to learn about how to handle the changes that come with moving into retirement since it’s a brand-new stage of life.
Research shows that there are both positives and negatives that can come as a result of retirement. Certainly, in North American culture retirement is idealized and celebrated as something to look forward to at the end of your career, but many couples also experience some disappointment when it turns out to be not as great as they had hoped.
Marital Satisfaction for Couples at Different Life Stages
One study looked at positive interactions between couples of different ages. The study showed that younger couples had the most positive interactions: good healthy, positive day to day moments. Middle age couples (40’s) had the least. And older couples (about 65 and over…the retirement group) had an intermediate amount of positive interactions. But the study also found that negative attitudes decreased with age. It’s normal for couples to go through tough stages of becoming parents, establishing their careers, getting mortgages paid off: this requires adjustments across the lifespan. It is reasonable to expect that going into retirement is going to require some adjustments as well.[1]
According to studies from around the turn of the century and current research, the divorce rate rises within the older population compared to the divorce rate of the younger generation. This raises an important question: if retirement is pitched as such a wonderful thing, why are people struggling in their most important relationships?
Retirement is a Life Transition
Transitioning into retirement comes with a lot of adjustments. Going from working to not working is just one of the changes that come with retirement. Many couples find themselves facing changes in where they live, changes in their routines with their spouse, and even changes in their identity. A retiring therapist might ask himself questions such as “Am I still a therapist if I am not doing therapy? What am I now? What is my purpose? What is our purpose?”[2] When retiring from any profession, one or both spouses may find themselves facing a shift in their sense of identity as they move into a new stage of life.
There are many other questions that come up for couples in retirement: How will you and your spouse decide what to do with your time? What is your retirement plan in terms of your savings: can you live without employment income for 10, 20, or 30 or more years?
In addition to these questions, the couple have to adjust to changes on the relational side of things. Couples find that they’re spending a lot more time together, more than they have for many, many years. Most retired couples are not raising children, caring for parents, or heading off to work for the bulk of the day. Suddenly, whatever your marriage is like, it is all right there in front of you and it has to be faced.[3] If your marriage has been strong and healthy — you’ll see the effects of that. And that’s great! For those couples, marital satisfaction will increase because they have even more time to spend together. But if your marriage really hasn’t been great for 20 years but you’ve made it through by focusing on raising and launching your kids, or concentrating on your career or business, and now you’re past those things and you’re just left with a “not great” marriage: that’s a challenging place to be in. Those escape mechanisms of work or other things are gone and not available any longer, and there’s a lot to figure out.[4]
Retirement Factors that Affect Marriage
One factor that impacts couples when they retire is whether or not they retire tog...
When you’re working through recovery from something like porn or sex addiction, depending on how deeply rooted that addiction is, it forces you to confront a number of different dynamics in all aspects of your life. Many people who do this difficult healing work are a blessing to others because they’re forced to face down so many issues, as often they have experienced a great deal of personal transformation. One of the important areas we look at in our therapy with those struggling with these addictions is attachment, something that we went into in detail back in episodes 251 to 254.
Attachment Calls Out the Blame Game
One of the unfortunate impacts of porn and sex addiction in marriage is that the addict often resorts to blaming tactics to defend or minimize the addiction. Of course, this is very hard on the spouse of the addict but when we understand the role of attachment in this sort of addiction, it helps us understand more of what is happening which in turn helps to push back on this blame game that gets played.
A few on the other. The more a person was comfortable with interpersonal relationships, the more the draw of his fantasies would diminish[1]. (e.g., genuine engagement scholars talk about the relationship between attachment style and sex or porn addiction. Leeds (1999, cited in Zapf et al., 2008) thought that an addict’s attachment style lived in tension between fantasy on one hand and genuine interpersonal relationships and connection and intimacy in marriage). It’s easy to see how someone is drawn towards fantasy based on their own attachment difficulties.
The father of attachment, John Bowlby, did not speak to sex addiction and attachment specifically, but he did point out that our individual assumptions about how we view others and ourselves are most significant in our closest relationships. This includes how comfortable a person is with being close to another person: indeed, much of attachment is about the intermittent effort to create closeness[2]. Thus, when you have an addiction like this occurring in a marriage, the addicted spouse is attempting to experience that closeness in a fantasy-based experience rather than in the context of a real, tangible, marriage bond. Again, you see that the attachment needs are there but they are pointed in the wrong direction.
Attachment difficulties are very common in people with sex addiction. A 2008 study (by Zapf et al.) showed that over 80% of the sex-addicted participants were characterized by attachment styles other than secure attachment[3]. Nearly half were of the fearful avoidant or disorganized attachment style where there’s a real longing for connection but a great fear of it as well, compounded by the shame-based concern of being really seen. You can see how pornography or sex addiction is an attempt to fit in the missing piece of that attachment puzzle.
Pornography Deteriorates Attachment
The problems of sex and pornography addiction are closely linked to difficulties in forming a close connection to one’s spouse. The research is beginning to show that individuals with sex addiction or pornography use have trouble forming close attachment to their spouse. Patrick Carnes, the grandfather of the whole sex addiction recovery movement conceptualized it as primarily a relationally oriented problem. Leedes (1999) wrote, “although the inability to form close attachments may not be sufficient to explain the etiology [source] of sexual addiction, it is a necessary component” (p. 218)[4]. Weinsten (2015) further notes that the acting out behaviours of sex addiction and compulsive pornography use are characterized by sexual activity minus emotional connection[5]. That is why you see these maladaptive attachment styles at play whenever you witness sexual compulsivity[6]. The acting out associated with these addictive patterns is like an attempt to gain intimacy, but without the emotional connection that comes with real intimacy with one’s ...
Emotional labour is a significant part of a couple’s relationship. Emotional labour was first coined by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her book, The Managed Heart (1983)[1]. She defined it as the work of managing your own emotions, but the term has been expanded to looking at the overall burden of managing or carrying emotions in a marriage and/or family context. You’ll probably be aware in your own marriage, one spouse often takes most of the responsibility for worrying about a particular issue: a struggling child, or financial issues, etc. That is part of their emotional labour that they are carrying in the marriage.
Emotional Labour is not Distributed Equally
Often, the burden of emotional labour is not borne equally by both partners in a marriage. According to a 2011 study by Ellison et al., women take on the majority of emotional labour bearing in marriage[2]. Women may be socialized or programmed to be more nurturing than men, and they typically take on not only their own feelings and concerns, but also those of their husband in order to accomplish daily tasks.
Morris and Feldman (1996) reported that nearly 2/3 of both men and women report that women tend to remind their spouse more often about things that need to be done like going to the grocery store or taking out the trash[3]. In addition, husbands don’t experience societal pressure to take charge of family to-do lists the same way wives do. Men are more likely to issue reminders about things from which they personally benefit. For example, making sure your wife remembers to buy you a new suit jacket for a work party. Women’s reminders, on the other hand, are more selfless and oriented towards others: organizing a child’s birthday party, picking up the family dry cleaning, taking the dog to the groomer, and so on.
The problem with the difference between men and women’s agendas comes back to the idea of emotional labour. In this case, the greater burden is on the wife. This can lead to burnout as she has to keep a happy face on but carry most of the emotional labour.
Emotional Labour Involves Mental Work
Emotional labour involves more than just who does what items on the to-do list. Morris and Feldman (1996) also noticed that husbands frequently don’t take responsibility to think beyond the task nor do we take initiative regarding the task[4]. For example: when a wife asks her husband to go to the grocery store, he may ask her to tell him what to buy. He may not put in the mental work of going to the kitchen and considering a meal plan and what’s in the pantry and fridge and figuring it out himself. So even though he goes to the grocery store and does the purchasing, which is helping out physically, he is not really helping with the emotional workload associated with the task.
Spouses Should Agree Division of Emotional Labour
Returning to the idea of fair division of labour: what matters in marriage is not that division of labour (emotional or physical) is exactly 50/50 but, rather, that the division is seen to be fair by both the husband and wife.
How exactly emotional labour should be divided is something that needs to be worked out in your marriage between you and your spouse. It may be that in your marriage it is perfectly fine for the husband to be given a list and just get the groceries. But it’s important to think beyond the example to the concept behind it. By considering the overall emotional burden, you may be in a marriage where both spouses appear busy and working hard to contribute to the functioning of the household, but the way you have arranged it may leave a much greater emotional burden on one spouse versus the other. That may lead to burnout. It may feel unfair. It may create resentment: even though both spouses as busy in the physical sense of doing things. This is definitely something you want to talk to your spouse about.
Because this subject is one that requires us to step back and reflect,
Secure attachment is foundational for strong marriages where both partners feel safe and secure. In the past three episodes, we’ve been looking at different styles of attachment that are born out of difficult childhood experiences. Today, we are considering the fourth style, secure attachment, which is really the goal that those of us with these other styles are striving for. Only about 46% of the population has secure attachment as their primary attachment style. We want to explore this one and really understand what it looks like so that we know what we’re aiming for if we are wanting to experience more of this style of attachment.
What Does Secure Attachment Look Like in Marriage?
One of the signs of secure attachment in a marriage is that both partners can take comfort in their spouse[1]. Couples with a secure attachment can share feelings of both joy and discomfort. They are also able to ask for help when they need it without fearing a negative response from their spouse.
Secure in Conflict
One of the times when it is most evident whether or not a couple has a secure attachment style is when they experience conflict. During conflict, securely attached couples are more able to discuss difficulties in a calm way without raising their voices or getting exasperated. Furthermore, they do not let conflict formulate doubts about the future of their relationship. When they do get into conflict, they are more likely to see that as “just a phase” or as a passing, temporary experience rather than allowing it to escalate into a question about their future together.
Couples with a secure attachment to each other trust the security of the bond that they have with their spouse. They can trust the integrity of that bond even when they are not getting along well.
One researcher looking at secure attachment during conflict also noted that those who have the ability to formulate or initiate affection toward their spouse maintain problem-solving communication while in conflict. By communicating well with one another even in conflict, they are more likely to express their needs to one another and prevent misunderstanding.
Secure in Interdependence
People with a secure attachment generally feel secure and connected in a wider variety of areas[2]. They allow themselves and their spouse to move more freely and have time alone without concern or questioning. It doesn’t mean they are together less, but the security allows a greater freedom to come and go without the security of their bond being questioned.
Generally, they are more in touch with their own feelings and so are able to be more empathic and understanding of their spouse’s emotions as well. They are very capable of offering support and comfort when their spouse is distressed. A healthy, interdependent relationship helps a couple when they are together and when they are apart.
Securely attached spouses also tend to be more honest, open and fair in their marriage. They feel comfortable sharing intimate thoughts (including regarding sexuality) and emotions. Their empathy tends to be more out front and leading in their interactions[3].
Another sign of secure attachment is that they enjoy doing activities with their spouse; they also enjoy their own space for doing some things separately. While those with anxious or avoidant attachment are less likely to view others as trustworthy, those with secure attachment feel that they can depend on others and they are more likely to perceive others as trustworthy.
Securely attached individuals also have better self-esteem and more positive thoughts of others. A lot of attachment is about how I view myself and how I view others. Avoidants tend to be high on self and low on others; Anxious tend to be low on self and high on others. Secure are more balanced: they are better able to trust others and sort things out when others let them down.
Secure as Parents
As parents,
A disorganized attachment style can cause a person to feel mixed emotions towards their spouse, which can be confusing if they are not understood in light of the other attachment styles. We’ve looked at anxious attachment and avoidant attachment in the previous two posts. Today we turn to disorganized attachment, or fearful avoidant attachment, which includes elements of both of these styles.[1] People with disorganized attachment fear intimacy but may also seek it out. They are both anxious and avoidant so may have a lot of mixed emotions when approaching relationships.
Inconsistency in Marriage
In a marriage, an individual with a disorganized attachment may have a negative view of themselves and their spouse. They may feel unworthy of support and may anticipate that their spouse will not support them. In turn, they are likely to feel uncomfortable relying on their spouse despite having a desire to be close and intimately connected to them.
Individuals with an avoidant attachment style are really are caught in a dilemma of independence vs intimacy. It can be hard for them to be vulnerable, to ask for help, or to trust their spouse. They may appear to have mood swings but this could just be a reflection of their attachment pendulum swinging between possessive demands of an anxious attachment and the dismissive independence of avoidant attachment.
Challenges a Spouse May Face
One of the challenging things for a spouse of someone with this attachment style is inconsistency. Their spouse may act differently depending on whether they are responding to the demands of the anxious or avoidant attachment style.[2] This may be frustrating at times, but compassion helps us to understand how to move towards a spouse who may have this attachment style.
The key here is to see that those with an avoidant attachment style have very deep internal conflict because they are afraid of needing their spouse, yet also have a deep need for their spouse.[3] This may result in behaviour that appears contradictory or confused: they will seek to approach their spouse in times of distress, but that approach may be interrupted or incomplete. It may appear to be chaotic or hard to make sense of because at the same time that they are making the approach, they are experiencing a desire to distance themselves. They may be combining this with aggressiveness or withdrawing kinds of behaviours that can make it difficult for their spouse to understand their actions.
Disorganized Attachment and Abuse
Sometimes, you’ll see abusive behaviours in this attachment style because the cycle of abuse requires a honeymoon period with a lot of closeness at one end of the cycle, followed by harsh, abusive behaviour at the other end. It doesn’t mean that all people with disorganized attachment resort to abuse or that all abusive spouses have disorganized attachment: it’s just making the observation that this is one area of overlap between these two constellations of behaviours.
Disorganized Attachment and Sexual Infidelity
Another thing that is sometimes symptomatic of a disorganized attachment style is a tendency to act out sexually, and in some cases, be unfaithful to their spouse. This certainly doesn’t mean all people with disorganized attachment are unfaithful or that all spouses who have affairs are disorganized in their attachment style.
However, because of the desire to be close but not be close, some people with this attachment style tend to have a larger number of sexual partners over their lifetime and they tend to be more sexually compliant. When someone solicits sex from them, they are more likely to say yes.[4] This is part of wanting a connection but also feeling afraid of that connection.[5] In a sense, the hookup culture provides connection without intimacy, so you can see how it might be easier for a person with this attachment style to engage in it.
Disorganized Attachment in Marriage
When we look at some of the areas that people with an avoidant attachment style struggle in, it’s easy to focus on extremes or exaggerate the way they interact with you. But your spouse can be avoidantly attached to you and still be a faithful, committed, reliable person in the marriage.
In this article, we’re going to look at the challenges that having an avoidant attachment presents in marriage. The section towards the end is especially important because it examines how an avoidant attachment style develops in childhood. Someone with this attachment style may behave in ways that seem like they are intentionally doing things to hurt you, and it is easy to take personally. But in most cases, there is no intent to harm or be difficult in the marriage. We really encourage you to listen to them with compassion and understanding.
Avoidant Attachment and Needing Others
The default posture of an avoidantly attached person is to not depend on others. There are a number of reasons they may have this fear. It may be because they are distrustful of close relationships or are afraid of relying on anyone else. It may also be because they don’t want to experience the pain of rejection. They may feel pressured to give the other person the level of support they receive. They may avoid being close enough to receive support from another because they don’t want to offer support in return and have their efforts rejected. This may be because there have been times when they have depended on someone else and it has led to disappointment.
A person with an avoidant attachment style places a lot of value on independence and being self-sufficient.[1] They may consider that to need someone else is to show weakness, so they sometimes develop alone wolf mentality. They may also seem to be very much in their head and working through problems rationally.
Attachment In the Brain
To fully understand the avoidant attachment style, we need to look at how attachment in general develops in childhood. When a child is with their parent and they experience a moment of threat or uncertainty or distress, their attachment system is activated. What this means is the part of the brain that is responsible for tracking and monitoring the safety and availability of their primary caregiver is turned on. The moment of fear prompts the child to re-establish if their parent is safe and available and can meet their needs. When the parent affirms this, the child’s brain turns the activation off.
A child whose caregiver is not available learns to prevent their attachment system from activating. They don’t let themselves get upset or distressed or needy towards a loving significant other. Therefore, they develop an avoidant attachment style: first towards their caregiver, and later on towards their spouse.
An avoidant attachment can have a significant impact on a marriage. An avoidant spouse may do the following things:
Averting their gaze from what they consider to be an unpleasant emotion in an attempt to prevent intimacy or connection.Tuning out a conversation related to commitment topics[2]Accusing their spouse of wanting too much from them when the spouse is asking for deeper emotional connection (Catlett, 2015)Turning towards busy work in the home or at work when conflict with their spouse threatens their sense of safety in the relationship, or using sulking or hinting or complaining to seek support from their spouse during a conflict or when in crisis.
All of these responses are geared towards keeping that attachment system deactivated. They’ll deny or minimize their vulnerability and repress their emotions as a way to manage emotions that have been aroused.
They Operate Independently
Because of the “not needing” others attitude and fiercely independent coping style that comes with keeping their attachment system deactivated, people with an avoidant attachment style are often very self-reliant. This desire for
Attachment is part of how we relate to others from an early age. Attachment is about the emotional bond that exists between two people — usually in a family or marriage context. Understanding your own attachment style and that of your spouse can help you figure out why you do the things you do during conflict or even everyday married life.
Understanding attachment can also help you see what you might do differently in order to secure and strengthen the bond between you and your spouse. Attachment is fundamental to marriage — so read through this article and the next three if you really want to learn about what is probably the most significant undercurrent in marriage.
This is the first of a four-part series on attachment. This article will focus on anxious attachment and how it affects a couples’ relationship in marriage.
How Your Attachment Style Develops
The basic idea of attachment theory is that how you were loved as an infant becomes critical to how you relate to significant others in your life as an adult. When you are a baby, your primary caregiver, usually a parent, will have a unique way of relating to you. We refer to this caregiver as an attachment figure. When you get married, your spouse becomes your key attachment figure. When you have kids, you become an important attachment figure to them. But we start with our own primary caregiver and the essential components of how they relate to you centre on this one fundamental question: was my attachment figure nearby, accessible, and attentive to me?
If a child grows up in an environment with an attachment figure who is available to meet their attachment needs, the child will grow up feeling loved, secure, and confident. The child is then likely to explore his or her environment more freely, play with others and be sociable.[1]
Attachment in Adulthood
The challenges or attachment injuries a person experiences in childhood impact not only them, but also the way they relate to their spouse. See our previous article: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE’s) and the Impact on Your Marriage. For an adult, the attachment system that was formed in childhood gives rise to the emotional bond that develops between him or her and their romantic partner. Two researchers took Bowlby’s studies of attachment and explored them in the context of marriage.[2] They noted certain parallels: infants/caregivers and adult romantic relationships share the following features:
Both feel safe when the other is nearby and responsiveBoth engage in close, intimate bodily contactBoth feel insecure when the other is inaccessibleBoth share discoveries with one anotherBoth study one another’s facial features carefully
Typically, once a person’s attachment style is established in childhood it remains with the individual through their adulthood.
Two terms that we will use frequently when talking about attachment are the words avoidance and anxiety. Avoidance is about whether or not a person is comfortable with closeness to a significant other. Do you seek connection and being seen? Or do you shy away from it or even really run from it? Anxiety is about your trust in the security of your connection. Do you feel at peace that your significant other is available, responsive and committed? Or are you needing to reassure yourself of this sometimes or even all the time?
Each person has an attachment style to their spouse. Sometimes, one spouse is one style, and the other spouse is a different one. For example, if you are anxious about your connection to your partner, your partner may be securely attached to you, which means the problem is not that your partner is unavailable or unreliable, but that you are not able to rest in and trust that he or she is available. That’s the part you have to take responsibility for. Conversely, your partner may begin the marriage as a securely attached person, but if you are consistently inconsistent in your availability or accessibilit...
Often, people see tension between spirituality and the field of psychology. Academics seem to look down on matters of belief as unintellectual, and the faithful sometimes think that scientists are secular opponents to all religion.
However, research is continuing to indicate that expressions of faith have tangible, measurable benefits. This holds particularly true about prayer.
Marriage Affects Cardiovascular Health
Marital strain and conflict can have a direct effect on your heart. In fact, researchers have found that these factors correlate with poorer cardiovascular health. In one study, they found that one of the large chambers of the heart, the left ventricle, thickens in response to marital distress.
This thickening is closely associated with a decrease in heart function along with other cardiovascular issues. So experiencing stress in your marriage will physically affect your heart. Surprisingly, prayer can reverse negative impacts on the heart.
Prayer Affects Cardiovascular Health
A new study came out this year that examined the impact of daily prayer on your health, specifically what is known as daily partner-focused petitionary prayer (PFPP).
This kind of prayer, while quite a mouthful, simply refers to speaking with God using your own words and language. You can contrast this against memorized or liturgical prayer–not because one is better than the other, but just as a way to define the scope of the study.
PFPP is praying to God for your well-being as well as the well-being of your spouse. It focuses on asking for support for the challenges you are facing in marriage.
The study found that PFPP had a positive impact on relationship communication and quality as well as certain specifics of cardiovascular functionality. This type of prayer reduces the strain of daily stress on the heart and improves its efficiency.
Prayer Affects Marital Health
Not only does this kind of prayer have positive benefits for your cardiovascular health, it also helps enhance your marriage.
Researchers have found that prayer that focuses on your spouse improves relational satisfaction, particularly as marriages mature. In a study by Fincham and Beach, they found that this enhanced satisfaction in relationships led to an overall increase in commitment.
A second study by Fincham and Beach confirmed their findings. As couples pray for each other, they find greater satisfaction in their relationship. And as that grows, they become more committed to one another.
And yet another study discovered that when you pray for your spouse, you become more willing to sacrifice for them, more so than merely having positive thoughts about them.
Intentional prayer in and for your marriage helps you enjoy your relationship and leads to a deeper, more intimate connection with your spouse.
How Prayer Impacts Marriage Prayer can be an effective tool to take a hard, honest look at your marriage, so we’ve put together a worksheet that will help you evaluate where you are in your relationship with your spouse. We’ve made it available to all of our supporters on Patreon, so go and check out how you can use prayer to intentionally reflect on your relationship.
Get the Worksheet!
Prayer Motivates Kindness
An essential factor in examining prayer is how it affects your thinking. For example, a study in 1990 took a look at how prayer affects your intentions and willingness to engage in certain behaviors that influence relationship functioning.
This study found that when you pray for your spouse, you are primed to think about them with more love and compassion. As a result, you will start to show greater respect and sensitivity to them.
How does this work? Think about what happens when you argue. Before the conflict, you feel in tune with your spouse, having the same goals in life. But as soon as the fight starts, new, selfish purposes appear that clash with those of your spouse.
However,
Being in a position of spiritual leadership is a challenge. While people will admit that pastors are just as human as everyone else, the standards and visibility on them are much higher. These higher expectations can make them especially vulnerable to infidelity and pornography.
Rather than entering into this conversation as a way to condemn, the goal here is to help spiritual leaders proactively seek to prevent moral failure. After all, their potential moral failure has an even higher impact, affecting not just the pastor and their family, but their ministry and congregation as well.
So in pointing out potential weak spots and blind spots, spiritual leaders will learn how to deal with the struggles that are common to people in their position. By becoming aware of these tendencies, they can learn to defend against them and protect themselves and their ministry.
How Common Is This Problem?
Ray Carrol, a former pastor, wrote “Fallen Pastor: Finding Restoration in a Broken World” after his own marital infidelity. In his research, he found that this issue was surprisingly common.
In an anonymous survey, 33% of pastors admitted to crossing the line with a woman not their spouse without having been caught. In another study, the respondents revealed that one in nine pastors (around 11%) had committed adultery.
Similar findings were discovered in a survey of 277 Southern Baptist pastors. 14% were involved in some inappropriate sexual activity. 10% disclosed that they had a sexual relationship with either a present or former member of the church.
Of course, our intent is not to single out the Southern Baptist denomination! But data from individual denominations can point to a systemic issue that extends beyond denominational boundaries.
Besides the problem of sexual indiscretion, pastors may also struggle with pornography and sexual addiction. Internet pom has become a significant pastime for ministers as well as church members. Christianity Today surveyed pastors and discovered that 18% of the pastors visit a pornographic site at least twice a month, with some visiting more than once a week.
Again, the point of mentioning these statistics is not to vilify or to condemn leaders, but to help leaders find healthy ways to deal with the problems common to people in their position.
What Motivates Male Infidelity?
While there are women in positions of spiritual leadership, the majority of data we have specifically addresses males. So for our female readers, we ask that you translate the data we present, as our research scarcely addressed the infidelity of female leaders.
Men who commit infidelity can be motivated by several factors: any one of these or a combination of them:
PowerOpportunityNarcissismDesire for Instant GratificationLack of Discipline / Self-controlFalse Feelings of InvincibilityDelusions of GrandeurCorroding Family / Marital RelationshipsJustification of Selfish Choices (i.e. lack of sex)
The Burdens of Pastors or Clergy
Church leaders are a very busy group of people. They suffer from a congregational expectation (explicit or not) that the local church is their priority, even more so than family. Because of the amount of attention the church requires, it can be challenging to relax at home and make time for their family.
Their long hours usually come in the context of spiritual calling and purpose. As a result, pastors can exhaust themselves emotionally, intellectually, and physically. And because they overstretch themselves, their capacity for intimacy and connection with their spouse diminishes, leading to a fading relationship at home.
This is because they are responsible for more than the logistical concerns of the church. They are also responsible for the emotional burdens of their parishioners. As pastors, they are expected to empathize with and even solve those burdens, eating away at the emotional reserves needed to connect with their spouse.
Additionally,
The road to discovering your spouse’s sexual addiction takes many forms. Sometimes, compulsive sexual behavior can be completely hidden for years before it is found out. It may happen as a single, devastating revelation or as a series of smaller discoveries.
Perhaps you already knew about their sexual compulsivity but hoped that marriage would somehow temper this behavior. But each promise that your spouse makes to change becomes yet another broken commitment.
Sexual addiction can have devastating consequences for the addict as well as their spouse. It’s essential to understand what it is, how to diagnose it, what causes it, and what a healthy path forward looks like for a marriage dealing with sex addiction.
Defining Sex Addiction
While still relatively new to psychology, sexually compulsive behavior is becoming an increasingly recognized phenomenon with a reasonably well-defined set of features. It is not merely an extension of a Christian worldview. Regardless of their religious background, a large number of researchers and therapists now specialize in the treatment of sex addiction.
The point of this article is not to preach against or shame sexual desire. After all, sex addiction is not necessarily about having a high sex drive. Just because you or your spouse enjoys having sex does not make either of you a sex addict.
Only You Forever has several certified sex addiction therapists on our team. We have years of experience in working with sex addicts, and we know how crucial it is not to confuse the enjoyment of sex with sexual addiction.
Sex addiction involves sexual expression or activity that is excessive, problematic, or out of control in either men or women. It can look like hypersexual or destructive sexual behaviors characterized by compulsivity, secrecy, or continuation of a behavior in spite of negative consequences.
These behaviors are harmful to at least one person if not more. The addict, their spouse, their lover, their family, their employer, or other members of society can be affected by their behavior. These effects span economic, health-related, psychological, social, or relational impacts.
It is a real problem, one that takes a substantial amount of courage and commitment to address. But recovery is possible.
Diagnosing Sex Addiction
DSM-V Proposal
The North American standard for articulating diagnostic criteria for disorders (the DSM-V, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) has not yet officially addressed sex addiction. However, a hypersexual disorder has been proposed.
Based on this proposal, individuals must have the following symptoms:
Over a period of at least six months, recurrent and intense sexual fantasies, sexual urges, and sexual behavior in association with four or more of the following five criteria:Excessive time is consumed by sexual fantasies and urges, and by planning for and engaging in sexual behavior.Repetitively engaging in these sexual fantasies, urges, and behavior in response to dysphoric mood states (e.g., anxiety, depression, boredom, and irritability).Repetitively engaging in sexual fantasies, urges, and behavior in response to stressful life events.Repetitive but unsuccessful efforts to control or significantly reduce these sexual fantasies, urges, and behavior.Repetitively engaging in sexual behavior while disregarding the risk for physical or emotional harm to self or others.There is clinically significant personal distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning associated with the frequency and intensity of these sexual fantasies, urges, and behaviors. In other words, it is impacting the quality of your life.These sexual fantasies, urges, and behaviors are not due to direct physiological effects of exogenous substances (e.g., drugs of abuse or medications), a co-occurring general medical condition, or manic episodes.
Everyone knows the “fairy-tale ending.” The prince and the princess get married, and they live happily ever after. While you will be able to find happiness in marriage, it’s common to experience hardships that fairy tales never address.
Sometimes, you will experience rocky times for a few days, months, or even years. The reality of two very different people living as a single unit is very challenging. But at the end of the day, it’s worth the effort. Studies show that married people are, on average, healthier, happier, and financially better off than those who are not.
So what do you do when you start to struggle with your marriage? While hard work and good intentions can help, sometimes you need the help of someone neutral and experienced to sort through these matters. That’s why people should seek marriage counseling.
Wives Generally See the Problem First
According to a 2016 study, women are the first to see the problem and the first to seek professional help. And this is also anecdotally true for many practices, as women are typically the first to reach out for counseling.
Why is this? By the time most couples are ready to look for counseling, their marriage has already become distressed. They often fall into patterns of blame, withdrawal, and even some aggression.
Husbands, in particular, feel a sense of failure and judgment when considering couple’s counseling. Because of this shame, they are less likely to reach out.
However, this is partly why couples counseling can be such a challenge. For one person to seek individual counseling is already a big step. Getting two people to agree that they need professional help is a much larger one.
Among couples who separated without seeking professional help, over 70% self-reported that one spouse was unwilling to go to counseling or that it was too late for counseling to help.
Barriers to Marriage Counseling
- Enforcing “Privacy”
It should come as no surprise in the age of Facebook and Instagram that couples are unlikely to share their struggles in marriage openly. Many people believe that their relationships should be kept private or that they can only divulge issues to spiritual leaders. Because of this mindset, couples are less likely to get professional help.
- Laying Blame
Another barrier to marriage counseling is the blame game. When two people are having problems in their relationship, it’s easier to say that the other is at fault rather than accepting the complicated, nuanced truth that each partner bears at least some responsibility.
Finger-pointing instead of taking responsibility is a significant factor in why many marriages end without getting the help they need.
It is crucial to reframe marital distress. The problem that both individuals face is an unhealthy dynamic, not one another. This reframing reduces the amount of blame cast on each other and helps couples work together to solve the problem.
- Lacking Prior Problem-Solving
Couples counseling is just one tool in a large kit for repairing a marriage. So if you haven’t used a similar tool, such as attending a retreat or workshop, reading a marriage book together, or having premarital counseling, you are less likely to seek counseling when running into marital problems.,
- Going Too Late
While often seen as a last-ditch effort to keep a relationship from falling apart, marriage counseling is more effective the sooner you go. Couples will usually wait for too long, often until levels of distress feel like the relationship is beyond repair.
On average, married couples wait for six years of serious marital problems before getting help. Counseling can still work in such late stages, but it’s still difficult. But the perception that there is it’s too late prevents couples from seeking therapy.
Key Factors Affecting Marriage Counseling Success Addressing marital issues can feel overwhelming. That’s why we’ve put together a two-part exercise that wil...
Shame is such a powerful emotion. The problem is, it can lead to seemingly contradictory behavior, particularly in the context of addiction. Shame’s close relationship with pornography consumption can cause porn addicts to fall into cycles of shame over their addiction, followed by giving into their addiction, followed by more shame.
As with most addictions, porn addiction typically has roots in other deficits. Because you are hurt, lack something, or desire something, you might turn to porn as a coping mechanism, hoping that it will provide the feeling or fulfillment you seek.
At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that porn is a maladaptive coping mechanism. Rather than helping with the problems it is supposed to solve, it simply makes them worse, particularly in the case of an addictive cycle.
The Link Between Porn and Shame
As the widespread use of pornography is a relatively new phenomenon, there is only a limited amount of research on its connection with shame. Despite this, there is a lot of anecdotal knowledge among counsellors and psychologists about the connection between, and combination of porn and shame.
This link has been documented as far back as 1989. In the book “Contrary to Love,” Patrick Carnes, the grandfather of the sexual addiction treatment movement, identifies shame and guilt as fuelling the despair in addiction.
An addictive cycle looks like this:
The addict experiences despair.In order to alleviate this feeling, they seek relief by acting out.Upon acting out, they feel shame and guilt.These feelings increase the feeling of despair.
While this cycle was discussed in the context of sexual addiction, porn addiction operates in much the same way. As you can see, the efforts of the addict only serve to temporarily deal with the feeling of despair.
So you can see how shame only deepens the cycle of porn addiction. Rather than equipping the addict to deal with the source of their problem, porn simply makes it worse for them.
In order to deal with porn addiction, you need to discover and deal with the root issues, not as a way to excuse the behavior, but to find where you need healing to start the process of recovery.
Shame Buried Out of Sight
A common denominator among some porn addicts is an early form of relationship trauma. These can range from abuse (sexual, physical, verbal, mental, etc.) to parental disregard or a variety of combinations.
With all of these issues, you can see a similar feature. Typically, the child will not find validation of their distress. Often their problems are minimized, ignored, or not acknowledge. As a result, they do not find healing, which perpetuates and often magnifies the pain they felt.
And when not dealt with, this lack of validation will cause the adult to seek it out elsewhere. Porn is an easy “fix” for this. So if you were never validated by your mother, you might find that porn stars are very validating. In some ways, they are.
But that validation is just an act. A fake, exaggerated facsimile of genuine human connection. The validation offered by porn doesn’t work because it’s not real. But the imitation is close enough that it subconsciously fires the reward circuits that keep you trying to get that need met.
Porn acts as an outlet for repressed emotions, wounds, and unrequited yearnings. Instead of having these needs met, porn is so accessible and provides enough temporary pleasure that it becomes an easy outlet or sort of balm or salve for these wounds. However, it never actually heals them, instead it requires more and more while returning less and less.
It is a lie. It cannot meet your needs.
Of course, this is not the same for everyone with an addiction to pornography. People can have a healthy childhood and still get hooked. But even in those cases, they experience this cycle of shame and addiction.
What’s the Problem With Shame?
The effects of shame are well documented. In 2015,
Most people have heard of boundaries and understand that it’s good to have healthy boundaries in marriage. But as with any psychological concept that enters the public sphere, its application can be quite twisted from its intended form.
Sometimes people will cut off members of their family, labeling that action as “setting a boundary”. Or others will use boundaries as a way to manipulate friends into doing what they want. By applying the term “boundaries” to these actions, people often are just using a generally accepted keyword to try to validate their actions.
At their core, boundaries are indeed necessary for healthy relationships, helping you navigate your complex dance with other unique individuals. When used appropriately, they help you move closer together to other people rather than moving away.
This is why it’s crucial to look at how you can create boundaries that uplift and strengthen your relationships and apply them in healthy, productive ways.
What Are Boundaries?
The term “boundary” defines the rules and limits you set in a particular relationship in order to establish a sense of safety. Safety in this context refers to an appropriate balance of closeness or distance in the relationship. In marriage, you typically set boundaries to define where you feel safe and able to be close with your spouse.
If a rule isn’t set, it isn’t a boundary. This can be a perfectly valid choice for your situation. For instance, you might simply make an observation (“I love it when you do this when we have sex”) or make a complaint (“When you drink, I can’t have honest conversations with you about our marriage.”). In these cases, rather than setting the boundary, you are stating something and letting your spouse react as they choose.
But if the issue is important enough to you and your marriage, making that observation or complaint might not be enough. You might choose to set a boundary.
For example, you might say that you will no longer discuss your marriage as a couple if your spouse is under the influence of alcohol. Or that you might be willing to experiment with your spouse’s sexual fantasies if they agree to stop when you say, “Stop.”
In each of these cases, the purpose of the boundary is to increase connection by establishing rules that will protect you and preserve your sense of safety.
Why Are Boundaries Important in Relationships?
Safety is fundamental for creating trust. If you don’t feel safe with your spouse, you can’t experience trust. And if you can’t trust your spouse, then you can’t develop intimacy. Boundaries help you feel safe enough to experience a deeper relationship with your spouse.
Typically, boundaries will define ownership and responsibility, which are closely related to self-esteem. When you establish boundaries, you are saying that you value not only your relationship with the other person but that you value yourself.
Boundaries help define what each person in the relationship is responsible for. A boundary between you and your spouse says that each of you is responsible for your own bodies, words, emotions, attitudes, values, and preferences. By establishing these boundaries and agreeing to abide by them, you create a strong foundation to build emotional intimacy together.
In marriage, boundaries clarify what you prefer or need from your spouse. Agreeing to the boundaries you set shows that they respect you. And by setting the boundary, you show that you respect yourself enough to tell them what you need from them.
If you think about it, marriage vows are a public form of boundaries. Each of you agrees to basic terms that are essential to your relationship to create safety, to create a foundation of trust, for intimacy.
Vows are an example of an explicit boundary as you are clearly expressing them to one another. Implicit boundaries are boundaries that are held without being stated. For example, you might expect that your spouse will work and provide ...
In the Book of Revelation, the Bible talks about Four Horsemen that will herald the apocalypse. Symbolizing pestilence, war, famine, and death, these Horsemen are meant to be the signs that indicate that the end of the world is imminent.
Borrowing from this Biblical illustration, Dr. John Gottman identified the four most critical indicators of marital separation: criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. Based on his study of over 2,000 couples for more than twenty years, he was able to identify especially problematic communication styles that could bring about the end of a marriage.
In fact, if these factors were left unaddressed, he could predict the end of the marriage with over 90% accuracy.
However, it isn’t all doom and gloom. Gottman also found that for each Horseman, there is an antidote that will help give your marriage a fighting chance.
The Research
Gottman sought to determine the most important predictors of marital failure and divorce. He took a look at many of the ways that couples communicate, including facial expressions, physiology, how they talked about each other and their relationship. And what he and other researchers found was that couples with the Four Horsemen present in their marriage were likely to divorce 5.6 years after their wedding day.
Most couples might think that other factors might be worse for a marriage than these Four Horsemen. However, this is not necessarily the case. For example, on average, emotionally disengaged couples would divorce 16 years after their wedding, meaning that marriages with this issue would typically last nearly 3 times longer than those with criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling.
The Four Horsemen are to be taken very seriously. In fact, of the Four, contempt is the most destructive. It is the strongest predictor of relationship failure. But Gottman found that these behaviors are related and that there is typically a sequence to them. Starting with criticism, couples shift to defensiveness, contempt, and finally shut each other out with stonewalling.
Despite the fact that these issues can lead to divorce, they often do not stop people from forming new romantic relationships. While the presence of the Four Horsemen can cause you to end your marriage, they are unlikely to cause the end of a premarital relationship. As a result, it is common for couples to get married despite having experienced these issues.
This doesn’t mean that the Four Horsemen are nonexistent in healthy marriages. What helps marriages succeed is confronting these issues together. While sometimes you tend to overlook serious issues during the dating phase of your relationship, if you are committed to your marriage, you will need to face these behaviors in yourself head-on.
The Four Horsemen
Let’s examine how each Horseman impacts your marriage.
Criticism
This is anything that communicates that your spouse is not worthy of your consideration or respect. Rather than focusing on behavior, criticism typically assaults character. The negative effects are often compounded by globalizing which happens when you use terms like “you always…” or “you never…”.
Criticism makes mistakes or even small incidents bigger than they should be and paints them as a result of permanent character flaws in your spouse. It accuses them of being such a bad person that they are not worthy of respect. Criticism inhibits addressing and modifying specific behaviors, instead offering suggestions as to why the other person will never change because of who they are.
Voicing criticism is different from simply voicing concern and displeasure, which are important and healthy practices in any relationship. But rather than helping you and your spouse learn and grow, criticism is destructive.
When you criticize your spouse, you destroy your view of them, their view of you, and even their view of themselves. And the more you undermine them,
Knowing how you feel sounds extremely simple. It’s something everyone sort of instinctively knows how to do, isn’t it? And amidst the myriad problems and concerns facing you and your marriage, why is this something you need to spend time on?
Being able to understand and identify your emotions is at the core of understanding yourself and connecting with others. It might seem simple, but something as fundamental as emotional intelligence impacts every facet of your life and especially how you relate to your spouse.
I “Feel” Like You Don’t Understand This
Many times, people simply start their sentence by saying, “I feel” or “I feel like...” By doing this, it might appear like they are expressing emotion. But most of the time, sentences like this are merely expressing thoughts, not feelings.
For example, if you say, “I feel like you don’t want to spend time with me,” you’re not talking about emotions. You’re talking about what you think. Just because you said the word “feel” does not guarantee that you’re describing your emotional experience.
So how do you express feelings? A great way to do this is to use emotion words like sad, disgusted, disappointed, or happy. When you use feeling words, you are expressing your emotions, not your thoughts.
There’s a great way to know if your “I feel” statement is actually about feelings. It’s called the “I think” check. Simply replace “I feel” with “I think.” If that means the same thing, then you weren’t expressing an emotion; you were just saying what you thought.
For example, you might say, “I feel like you never listen to me.” If you replace “I feel,” you end up saying, “I think you never listen to me.” Because this statement still makes sense, “I think” is more accurate; therefore, you are talking about what you think, not what you feel.
But if you said, “I feel sad when you don’t listen to me,” the “I think” test fails. It wouldn’t make sense to say, “I think sad when you don’t listen to me.” This is a genuine feeling statement: in this case you are sharing your emotional experience.
This might seem somewhat trite, but you’d be surprised how many people use the phrase “I feel” incorrectly. Making sure you use it properly to describe emotions and not just thoughts is a big step in developing and growing emotional communication in your marriage.
The Biology of Emotion
In order to understand emotion, you need to understand how it interacts with your body.
Within your brain, there are several structures that are known to be involved with emotions. Your hypothalamus activates the nervous system, leading to an emotional response. The thalamus, amygdala, and other cortical areas help process emotions as well.
But what makes the amygdala special is that it transmits information out to nerve endings, resulting in a physical response to emotional stimuli.
What does this look like? A common example of this is witnessing someone getting badly hit in the groin. That “ugh” reaction you feel in response might cause you to fold up a little bit as if you yourself were hit in that area.
Now, you yourself were not hit in the groin. But witnessing someone being hurt that way inspires a sympathetic emotional reaction that results in a physical response.
There is a brain and body connection. This is why therapists and psychologists will ask clients where in their body they feel the emotion. A feeling of happiness might cause one’s body to feel noticeably lighter. A feeling of anxiety might cause tension and a feeling of weight in one’s abdomen.
This is why it’s called a feeling–because the emotion will always result in a physical sensation.
Which Comes First: Brain or Body?
There has been a lot of research on the origin of emotion in individuals. Some research indicates that emotions start solely in the brain before being felt in the body. Other research suggests that the body itself can cause conscious emotions.
Most likely, both are true.
Marriages can be strange. You slog through the daily grind, but at least you’ve got your partner. You think that everything’s fine, but then one day you wake up and realize that you don’t feel close to your spouse anymore.
This is a common event in any marriage. Sometimes it’s because of normal life transitions. Sometimes it’s something drastic, like the death of a parent, or a traumatic accident. Or maybe the excitement you once felt has just gradually disappeared until you’re just… bored.
Is that such a bad thing? Isn’t it normal as you grow older for romance to fade? Isn’t it enough just to be committed and to remain faithful? Do you really need to try to rekindle the fire?
Why You Need to Keep the Romance Alive
It’s easy to think of romance is just an emotion, one that isn’t necessary compared with your mutual commitment to marriage. But romance is more than that. There’s a reason why you vow not just to love but also to cherish.
When you stop having sex or intentionally dating your spouse, your neglect tells your spouse that they aren’t special to you anymore. It tells them that you no longer care about your relationship or your marriage. It’s not uncommon for this neglect to manifest itself through lower self-esteem in your spouse. By stopping the romance, you communicate that you no longer value them enough to give them the special attention you once gave them.
In order to work together as a couple, you need to depend on one another. But if it feels like you aren’t valuing each other, you will start to depend on yourself rather than each other. When that happens, you raise the question of whether or not the marriage is working or necessary anymore. The lack of romance will increasingly cause both of you to wonder if this marriage is even worth the effort.
However, research shows that rekindling commitment to romance can reinvigorate your marriage. Actively keeping the romance in your marriage alive strengthens your spouse’s confidence in you. It builds their confidence in you as a partner in life and in marriage, someone they can rely on.
So yes. You need to make the effort to show your spouse that they are special and loved by you. You can’t allow your marriage to grow cold and stagnant.
But what do you do when romance has faded? How do you rekindle the flame of your first love?
What Erodes Romance?
Everyone’s situation is unique and personal to themselves. Because of this, there are countless reasons why your marriage might erode. And often, they are personal to you.
Sometimes external demands can dominate your focus, pulling your attention away from your spouse. A difficult phase in your child’s development, new responsibilities at work, a chronic illness, or other stressors can upset the balance of your marriage.
Other times, you just forget to be curious about your spouse. You become overly familiar, and stop asking questions because you feel like you already know everything about them. You might start becoming purely pragmatic, treating your marriage like a business arrangement, taking sensuality and sexuality out of the picture.
Each of these reasons will wear away at your marriage, often in conjunction with each other. But there is one that you need to take special care to defend against.
Beware of Boredom Especially
Newlyweds have a hard time imagining that marriage could be boring. Because you didn’t know each other well at the time, everything is new, shiny, exciting. It’s hard to be bored when every day, every minute spent together produces another revelation about your significant other.
But once this period of accelerated discovery fades, boredom can creep in if you do not take precautions. That initial excitement comes from rapidly growing closer together, which is easy when you really don’t know anything about the other. And while it is natural for this period to fade, allowing boredom to build reduces your overall marital satisfaction.
It might seem strange to be focusing on the betraying spouse. After all, they weren’t the ones who were victimized. However, if the betraying spouse does not grow as a result of the wrong they did, that leaves their betrayed spouse vulnerable.
So yes, it is vital for you, the betraying spouse, to help your partner cope with the fallout of your betrayal. But in the aftermath, you too must focus on your own healing process as well. In this way, you take tangible steps to safeguard your spouse from the possibility of betraying them in the future.
Balanced Coping is Important
Betraying your spouse opens up your marriage to many interpersonal conflicts for you to address. How you choose to cope with these conflicts will largely determine the future of your marriage.
One common tendency might be to focus solely on the needs of your betrayed spouse. It’s easy to devote all your efforts towards calming them down. The risk in this approach is you keep yourself from dealing with the fact that you betrayed them. You don’t address why you did it in the first place, much less how you can prevent yourself from repeating the past.
Or you might even ignore the effects of the betrayal altogether. You act as if nothing happened, turning a blind eye towards the elephant in the room. You think that perhaps the storm will pass, and life will go on as it did before.
Or you might take it to another extreme and focus all of your attention on yourself. You become so self-absorbed in your frustration and even self-pity because of the realization that you have betrayed someone. You force your spouse, intentionally or not, to take care of you instead of leaving them room to deal with their own needs.
This is where balance comes in. In the aftermath of your betrayal, you will need to accommodate both your spouse as well as your own issues. Despite the tension between the concern for your spouse and concern for yourself, you cannot simply focus solely on one or the other. To address both, use an integrated, balanced approach.[1]
Having balanced coping is necessary for the long-term health of your marriage. In the first days following betrayal, your spouse will need extra attention to help their healing process. But as they heal, start concentrating on your own journey of growth so that you do not repeat the betrayal.
In cases of severe or even profound betrayal, it is ideal if both of you have your own individual counselors, with a third counselor who sees you as a couple. This way, you each have someone on “your side” helping you grow while a neutral third party can help you navigate the crisis between the two of you.
Dealing With Shame and Guilt From Betrayal
When you do something you are not proud of, shame and guilt are two very common emotional reactions. They help regulate moral behavior by increasing your self-awareness and stress, helping to make it more difficult to do things that go against your own values.
However, researchers have found that guilt and shame also influence how you handle problems in your relationship.[2] As a result, it’s important to understand how to deal with these emotions.
Understanding Shame
How do you see yourself? When you’ve done something you deeply regret, how do you see your character and identity? After you’ve betrayed someone, shame may tell you that you are a betrayer, a cheater, an immoral person, or something like this.
Shame makes you feel hopeless because it talks about you as if this is who you have always been and always will be. It frames your betrayal as more than an act: as an integral part of your identity.
While it is crucial to recognize the magnitude of your betrayal and its effect on your spouse, it is more important to focus on the behavior and consequences rather than on shame-based identity motifs.
Rather than pushing you to change and to become a better person, shame paralyzes and prevents you from growing. It disables you,
So you’ve taken the initial steps towards helping your spouse heal from your betrayal. You admitted your guilt. You demonstrated your remorse. You showed your willingness to make it right. And your spouse sees and understands this.
But you still find yourselves caught in a cycle where you go back to the same thing over and over again.
First, make sure you’ve already issued a sincere, thoughtful apology and have truly made an empathic acknowledgment of all the ways in which your betrayal impacted your spouse. If you haven’t done this yet, please refer to Part 1 because doing so is integral to showing them that you identify with their pain, which is essential for the foundation of your spouse’s healing.
It’s helpful to remember that recovering from betrayal takes time. To help you, here are some things to keep in mind as you continue to face the consequences of your actions:
- Be Patient
The offending spouse will almost always find themselves assuming or pushing for a quick recovery. But traumatic experiences like betrayal are often life-changing. They don’t just affect your spouse’s present emotions; they can change his or her entire worldview.[1]
While your spouse may have moved on from the initial feelings of shock and numbness, they may continue to harbor insecurity, suspicion, and distrust of you. They may even have continuous rage against you, which you will find can be much harder to deal with than continuous sadness.[2]
Your physical intimacy during this period might be unpredictable as well. Sometimes couples experience a period of hypersexuality as both are desperate to heal the breach in their marriage. Or sometimes the betrayed spouse will refuse to share in any sexual intimacy or intercourse until they are ready.
There are no quick fixes here. You need to take the long view, to understand that this is a lengthy process, one that will have ups and downs. You and your spouse might enjoy a few good days that feel normal again, but be careful that you do not assume that things are completely healed.
Often those smooth periods are followed by turbulent ones. You might be frustrated, feeling like the two of you have reverted, that you haven’t made any progress. You might get upset when you hit some bumps again because you think you’ve already dealt with this.
But a healthier and more realistic way to look at this process is from a broader perspective. Patience will help you understand that you are on a long, slow (but continuous) trajectory towards healing, one that has both good times and tough ones. The good times should not be taken as a sign of arrival just like the tough times should not be taken as a sign that you’ve made zero progress.
Rather, just understand there are good times and tough times on the journey to healing. With time, you’ll see that the good times become longer and more frequent than the tough times. The journey will require patience.
- Be Helpful
It’s very easy to withdraw from your spouse during this time. Causing betrayal trauma can lead to feelings of hopelessness in your marriage. You need to resist this tendency to withdraw when discouraged. Instead of shying away, take time to have those difficult discussions with your spouse. Show that you are willing to do the difficult work of making things right.
As you have these discussions together, there are certain things to be mindful of. While you will have to discuss the betrayal in order to help your spouse make sense of things and to help the two of you take tangible steps towards change, there are a couple of ways that these discussions can become unhelpful.
The first is in giving too many details of the betrayal. For example, the sexually betrayed spouse will sometimes want to hear all the gritty particulars of your encounter or encounters, but sharing them might actually retraumatize him or her. While you do need to be open in order to reestablish trust,
It finally happened. Maybe it was the first time, maybe the twentieth. You betrayed your spouse, and they know what you did. And now you feel awful. You want to make it right, to go back to how things used to be before you did the unthinkable.
But even after some time, you don’t seem to be making any progress. Your spouse reacts very strongly to minor things and even things seemingly unrelated to the betrayal. Clearly, they haven’t gotten over it. What is happening?
When your spouse experiences a significant betrayal, it often leaves lasting trauma. And helping your spouse get over an affair is going to take work and effort from you. When dealing with that trauma, you want to make sure that you that the words you say and the actions you take to contribute to their healing and wellbeing, rather than adding to the problem.
One of the most common struggles for a spouse who has betrayed their love one is to be somewhat (or very) defensive when discussing the betrayal.
Why Defensiveness Doesn’t Work
As the offending spouse, it’s very easy to be defensive. You admitted that you were at fault; what more can you do? You’re working on changing yourself to make sure it doesn’t reoccur, so why can’t they realize that and get on with their life?
Many times that defensiveness comes from a good place. You might be trying to calm down your spouse to create an environment more conducive to healing. So you downplay what you did in an attempt to minimize the hurt your spouse is feeling. “It wasn’t so bad,” you say. “There’s still hope for our marriage!”
This defensiveness and minimization is an automatic response, but at the end of the day, it perpetuates the problem. It tells your spouse that you don’t understand their pain, and inadvertently sends a signal that this betrayal may happen again.
It’s a genuine but misguided effort at taking care of your spouse’s pain.
Sometimes this response happens due to ongoing addiction, the very same addiction that led to the betrayal in the first place. And you are still stuck in the first step to recovery. You haven’t accepted your addiction; you are still in denial.
Regardless of why you are defensive, your spouse sees your reaction as proof that you don’t understand the gravity of the situation. In the case of addiction, it communicates that you don’t know how out of control you are, so they are pressured to increase the volume of their accusations to break through your denial. And the more you deny, the more you minimize, the louder they must become. Even apart from an addiction, your defensiveness sends the signal that you aren’t willing to see the pain your betrayal caused.
This cycle can be extremely distressing to both of you and very difficult to stop. To break the cycle, you need to do three things to help you move forward:
- Admit Your Guilt
Your defensiveness can show up in a few ways. In some cases, it is just a brazen denial of guilt (to the point of lying). In this case, you may hope that by denying all that happened your spouse may not be hurt as badly. That’s nice: but your spouse already knows you’re lying so this approach is not going to work.
In other cases, it’s not about lying but about trying to talk your spouse out of the negative feelings they have around the betrayal. Again, there’s a sincere attempt to help your spouse overcome the profound distress of the betrayal. The difficulty is that this approach also comes across as if you’re actually denying your guilt. It won’t work.
And in other cases, you may be pushing some of the blame back on your spouse: perhaps even going as far as to say if s/he was more sexually available, you wouldn’t have gone looking outside your marriage. Of course, this also comes across as a denial of your own guilt because of the blame shifting involved. It also won’t work.
You have to admit the full extent of your responsibility instead of denying it or blaming the other person for your choices.
These days, it’s difficult to have an open conversation about privilege because it has become such a hot button political issue. But if we can take a step back from political agendas, we can see that there is quite a lot of research that shows the reality of privilege and its impact on marriages.
So here, there will be no accusatory fingers, no tearing down of the idea of being men. Taking a look at research-based observations on the reality of male privilege will help husbands empower both themselves and their wives in their marriages.
Privilege Explained
In general, privilege is an advantage that a person or a group has that others may not. Sometimes, this can be situational. For example, by being the most attractive person in the room, you may enjoy the privilege of being given the most attention. This situational privilege comes and goes depending on your specific context.
However, privilege also can be constant, or at least more long-term. By having a certain wealth, citizenship, race, and/or gender, you are afforded certain benefits wherever you go that others without those advantages do not.
There is nothing wrong with having privilege! Being born into a specific context does not make you a better or worse person. However, we do need to be aware of our privilege. We need to acknowledge its presence in our experience.
One way to look at it would be like how people look at biases and opinions. If someone says that they have an unbiased opinion, you know that this is impossible. Since everyone has certain biases, a more honest approach would be sharing an opinion while acknowledging the biases involved.
Similarly, you can have better relationships and conversations when you recognize that others do not have the same privilege as you do. By not recognizing those privileges, you might unwittingly leverage them to your personal gain or even exert dominance. You can better love your neighbor when you can see where you have advantages that they do not and use those advantages for their benefit.
Acknowledging privilege can often be difficult because it requires humility. It means realizing that some of your advantages may not be fully earned due to merit, which can be quite hard to admit. But in doing so, you can learn to esteem others better than yourself and reduce the risk of mishandling the privilege that you carry.
To bring this concept into the real world, let’s look at what it means for a husband and a wife to be preparing for church or simply going out. Typically, the husband doesn’t have to be worrying about a whole lot when he’s getting ready. However, the wife is much more likely to consciously worry about how she looks: both in terms of feeling that her beauty and her modesty may be evaluated at church.
A husband’s frustration with the amount of time required for his wife to get ready in this context is a reflection of the fact that there are different societal expectations based on gender. You tap your feet impatiently, wondering why your wife is spending so much time “unnecessarily”. Why does she need to bother with makeup or spending so much time on her hair? This is an example of male privilege: the husband has the benefit of lower expectations being placed on him.
One of the key goals of talking about privilege is to become aware of it. This will help you understand your wife better and extend empathy to her rather than getting frustrated with her for taking the time to deal with things you don’t need to think about.
Understanding Male Privilege Generally
You can’t help being born as a man or a woman. There’s nothing wrong with that. But the way you experience the world is shaped by your gender. This ranges from physical and biological differences (e.g. typically higher levels of testosterone and greater physical strength) to social differences in priorities, values, and concerns.
One researcher observed that the world has generally been shaped to cater to men’s i...
How could they do this to you? After everything you’ve been through together, after everything you’ve promised each other, they just set that aside and betrayed you, the one they claimed to love the most. When your spouse has hurt you deeply, it’s natural to feel incredible grief, anger, and pain because of what they did.
It can be difficult to talk about forgiveness after the most painful of betrayals. But at some point, you do need to address it because, in order to heal, you also need to forgive. Maybe you’re not ready right now. That’s okay. Come back to this article when you are.
But right now, let’s look at what it means to forgive after a betrayal, and what it will take to get there from here.
Forgiving a Betrayal
Forgiveness is more than just a single decision, particularly when dealing with deep hurt. It’s a journey of many steps, a process filled with difficult, sometimes painful decisions. The process of forgiveness is what brings you from feelings of ill-will or malicious intentions (i.e. revenge, punishment, avoidance, or hatred) to having a sense of “benevolent emotion”.
You know that you have forgiven when you are able to have warm, kind thoughts about the person who has wronged you. When you make the shift from negative feelings about your spouse to positive ones. That won’t happen all at once; as you forgive, you will still be angry and hurt even as you start to build that benevolent emotion towards them. Again, this is a process.
And this forgiveness is something that you need, your marriage needs. In order for you and your marriage to be healthy, you need to forgive. Not the day after a betrayal. You need a chance to vent your anger, to grieve, to understand what’s happened before starting this journey. Depending on the betrayal, this might take weeks or even months. And that’s okay!
But when you are in a place where you’re ready to forgive, and when you are in a safer place where betrayal in marriage is no longer likely, you’ll find it’s time to take that first step towards forgiveness.
How To Forgive Betrayal in Marriage
One of the reasons that forgiveness of a grave offense is so difficult is that it involves reframing. That is to say, you will need to take a close look at the betrayal, your betrayer, yourself, and then your relationship from a more positive perspective. It will take a lot of time and effort, but it will be worth it!
- Reframe the Action
The first difficult step in the process is reframing what your spouse did to you. You will have to see what they did from a point of empathy, which will help you towards forgiveness by lessening the anger and blame you feel. And boy, is that tough!
Empathy means seeing the world through some else’s perspective. And when you have been betrayed, it means changing how you view the betrayal. In order to better understand it, you need to retrace how and why it happened.
This is not about excusing your spouse for what happened because ultimately it was their decision to do it. Empathy means taking in the bigger picture of what was happening to them in the larger trajectory of their life that contributed to their terrible decision.
When you are able to understand the how and the why of the betrayal, you are able to gain a more objective perspective of it. And as a result of reframing their action, you will start to feel relief from your feelings of anger against your spouse and what they did to you.
- Reframe How You Feel
When you’ve been betrayed in marriage, you will naturally focus your attention on the hurt and the pain of it all. This is why it’s important to reframe the action by empathizing with your spouse. It will also help you to reframe how you feel about them.
By reframing, you begin to restore the balance of your feelings about your spouse. After all, there is far more to who your spouse is then the wrong that they did to you. And by seeing the bigger picture,
So you’re trying to have a serious conversation with your spouse, but it doesn’t seem to be working. They aren’t answering the questions you ask. Instead, they seem to be ignoring you or shutting you out. And that just gets you even more upset. Don’t they care?
It’s easy to take these situations personally, to assume that these actions are deliberate. But what if it wasn’t? When you conflict with your spouse, something interesting happens inside of both of you that inhibits your ability to hear or even to remember what is said.
What’s Happening on the Inside?
To properly understand what is going on when your spouse appears to be shutting down or shutting you out during marital conflict, you need a quick primer on the nervous system.
Your central nervous system (CNS) is a collection of nerves and cells that connects your brain and spinal cord to the rest of your body, allowing signals and messages to be transmitted back and forth. Always on, it enables you to control your bodily functions, most of which are subconscious.
By not having to concentrate on things like your heartbeat or digestion, this frees you up to focus on higher level tasks. You can work, exercise, watch movies, or talk with others. Since the CNS handles the plethora of unconscious tasks in your body, you can focus on the conscious challenges.
When Stress Happens
In the event of a stressful situation, the CNS responds, affecting you on both conscious and subconscious levels. Based on the severity of the threat, it begins to override every other priority that you have at the moment. This strong response is designed to protect you from potential danger. If you encountered a wolf as you walked in the local park, your CNS response would allow you to quickly stop worrying about what’s for dinner and instead focus on not becoming dinner.
These responses can range from moderate to extreme, depending on the situation. Extreme responses are usually given for extreme situations when you are in clear, imminent danger.[1] In these cases, your CNS might shut down enough body functions that you flee, collapse, faint, or dissociate from the experience.
Our primal desire to stay alive is more important to our body than even our ability to think about staying alive [or to think about much else, for that matter].[2]
While marital conflict does not typically trigger this extreme reaction, it still is common for conflict to trigger a notable CNS response. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you feel that your spouse is a threat to you. However, if they are upset with you, then your safety in your marriage is at risk. Because safety is at risk, your CNS triggers alarm bells to try to protect that safety.
When you have a serious conflict with the most important person in your life, your body registers this as a significant emergency. It activates all of the fight or flight tools for survival like increased heart rate, respiration, and cortisol. And worse yet, it decreases your ability to reason, ironically making it more challenging to deal with the conflict at hand.
What Really Happens When You Fight
Another issue with this response is that it is most concerned with self-preservation. When you are fighting with your spouse, you need to focus on preserving your marriage, not yourself. Please note that this is about typical marital conflicts, not situations of spousal abuse when you do need to be focusing on self-preservation.
When your nervous system is activated, your thought patterns do not run the same way they do when you are calm. Your CNS response makes it more challenging to be open and engaged, making it more difficult to exchange information and affection. It affects nearly every single organ in your body.
Your body starts to release hormones like adrenaline. Your mind becomes hyper-aware of your environment. Your heart begins to race, and you might even start to sweat. Your fight or flight system activates,
There are few things more discouraging than coming to your spouse with something exciting to share and being met with a blank stare. Or saying what a disappointing day you’ve had and being told to be more positive.
In relationships, you want to be understood. You want your spouse to feel what you feel, to validate the experiences that you’re having. It can be devastating when that doesn’t happen. But if you’re able to cultivate empathy, you will be able to find more stability and intimacy in your marriage.
What is Empathy?
More than simply hearing someone else, empathy is about being able to take on their perspective almost as if it were your own.[1],[2] You can stand in their shoes and see the world through their lens. It’s about being able to fully understand what a situation is like for someone else.[3]
It’s not enough to feel sorry for the other person. Empathy is not the same as sympathy. Experiencing empathy is telling them that you can feel their pain and understand why they feel it, not merely feeling sorry that they are in pain. Showing empathy in this way validates their experience, telling them that it’s understandable to feel this way.
Empathy doesn’t necessarily require you to agree with the other’s perspective. If your spouse is furious with how a friend treated them, showing empathy doesn’t mean you have to be angry at their friend. But it does mean being willing to listen and understand the reasons for their anger. It means acknowledging that it makes sense they would be upset.
It can be challenging to feel the ups and downs of another your spouse’s experience. But if you take the time to hear them out and put yourself in their shoes, you can offer them something valuable: being seen and understood.
Why Should You Empathize?
In marriage, empathy brings a broad range of benefits to the table.[4] Being able to show empathy to your spouse is a big part of being able to have a well-adjusted and stable relationship. When you can understand their perspective, you will be able to better adjust to married life, reducing the possibility of divorce.
Empathy is a skill that you develop, and some marriage counselors even suggest empathy training for newlywed couples. For some, it comes naturally, but training can help individuals be more understanding despite not learning this skill as children or even as adults. And everyone can benefit from further developing empathy, as it provides new and more profound ways to communicate and interact.
Research shows that becoming better at expressing empathetic understanding often leads to improved relationship satisfaction. After all, feeling understood meets a deep need that can’t be found anywhere else.
How Can You Build Empathy?
There are three primary building blocks to help expand in your capacity for empathy:[5]
- Honesty
To see things from your spouse’s perspective, they first have to be able to share it with you. If you want your spouse to understand you, you need to be open and willing to share your perspective with them. Looking for your spouse to feel what you feel? You have to be honest about how you’re feeling.
So dishonesty gets in the way of allowing yourself or your spouse to extend empathy. Sometimes it creeps in for genuine reasons. You might want to protect your spouse from the stress of your work life, so you choose to say that you’re okay after you come home.
But you need the courage and willingness to expose even the most carefully hidden parts of you to your spouse. If you want to have a deeper relationship, you need to be honest and vulnerable enough to share everything with your spouse, not just the easy stuff.
- Compassion
While similar to sympathy, which was defined above, compassion goes beyond just feeling bad for someone. It’s about genuinely seeking to understand for the sake of helping the other.
Compassion helps to develop your empathy because it provides a caring motivation for doing ...
So there you are, carrying on with your day as usual when for some reason, your spouse does something completely unexpected. You have two options at this point. You could make an assumption based on previous experience, or you can choose to investigate further to find out something new.
Making an assumption is generally more comfortable, but it represents a missed opportunity to get closer to your spouse. When confronted with the unexpected, curiosity can push you into areas of discovery that will deepen intimacy in your marriage.
What Is Curiosity?
Curiosity is the desire to learn new things, bridging the gap between what you know and what you want to know.[1] If irreducibility is the idea that your spouse is infinitely complex, curiosity is the drive that pushes you to continue your quest to know them.
Typically, curiosity leads to a sense of resolution as you find something new. That discovery satiates you, and you move on. Not so with marriage. In some ways, curiosity is like sex. When you have physical intimacy with your spouse, there is a resolution to your lovemaking but that resolution is never finally satiated. You will want more.
Curiosity allows you to seek and discover new things about each other continually. When you find out something new, it is satisfying but that does mean the discovery of all there is to learn about your spouse is complete. There’s always more!
And so curiosity and irreducibility provide a cycle that repeats itself over and over. Curiosity seeks new information that irreducibility provides, discovers it, and then provides a feeling of resolve when you learn something new.[2] And so curiosity pulls you into a grand, lifelong chase of exploring your spouse, always pushing you towards the next revelation.
How Does Curiosity Affect Intimacy?
Knowing the different ways that curiosity affects intimacy will help paint a picture of how you can apply curiosity in your marriage. Here are five ways that curiosity works to deepen intimacy:
1. Curiosity Leads to Deeper Understanding of One Another
As the saying goes, closed mouths don’t get fed. You can’t learn about your spouse if you do not allow yourself to.[3] Curiosity supplies the drive to discover new revelations, creating the opportunity to build understanding in your marriage.
That understanding is critical to finding acceptance in each other. For example, when your spouse does something that agitates you, without enough information, you will tend to make up your own explanation. And in a distressed marriage, confirmation bias will often influence you to assume the worst.
Curiosity provides a healthier response. When confronted with something you don’t understand, curiosity helps you constructively seek to understand what is happening for your spouse. Doing this allows you to improve your relationship instead of making assumptions that inhibit growth.
2. Curiosity Helps Both of You Grow
When you ask your spouse questions, you allow them to share things with you. When they choose to share, and you listen to them, a process begins called self-expansion. Essentially, this is the process of growing and learning from the things your spouse shares with you.
When we are in a relationship that offers self-expansion opportunities, besides feeling closer to our partner, we become linked to them—their qualities become part of us. Several studies show that greater self-expansion corresponds to greater relationship satisfaction and commitment.[4]
Self-expansion helps you to grow through what your curiosity uncovers about your spouse. In a way, their strengths, ideas, and resources become yours as well. When you witness your spouse showing growth you didn’t see before, that encourages you to grow in that area as well.
As curiosity helps you grow, you become more fulfilled in and committed to your marriage. Because you are now working as one unit. Curiosity and self-expansion mean that when one of you gr...
How can your marriage work when the two of you are so wildly different? At the start of your marriage, it’s easy to overlook those differences. But the more you get to know your spouse, the more you realize that they are a totally distinct person from you.
While that can be overwhelming or even unexpected, this is an incredible step towards developing intimacy. Learning to appreciate and explore the mystery of the individual you are married to will help you grow closer to one another.
Irreducibility and Autonomy Build Intimacy
The first step, while perhaps a little tedious, is to define terms. Irreducibility and autonomy are critical psychological concepts to nail down. Once you see what each means, you will see how crucial they are as you work to build a marriage together.
Autonomy in Marriage
You and your spouse are separate people. And autonomy means that you each have the ability and the right to govern yourself [1]. Each of you can be independent and complete without the other.
This might seem to contradict how you might see marriage portrayed. Some of the most romantic quotes from movies (e.g. “you complete me”) can give the impression that we are incomplete without the other. This isn’t the case; you are absolutely capable of existing apart from your partner.
Marriage is choosing to become interdependent, to become one, not surrendering the capacity to be independent altogether. Understanding this will protect you against psychological abuse that says that you can’t live without your partner or that says you are nothing without them.
Autonomy in marriage means that no matter what, you and your spouse are two individuals with the ability to make choices independent from each other (even though you have chosen to live inside the union of marriage).
Irreducibility in Marriage
Knowing that you are separate allows you to build on that idea. Since you are autonomous, you will never fully understand the mind and heart of your spouse. This is irreducibility. Being different people means that each of you will have different emotions, thoughts, and motivations.
And this is a great thing! If you could fully understand and comprehend your spouse, then at a certain point, your intimacy would stop growing. Your marriage would become stagnant if you stopped trying to get to know your spouse.
Irreducibility brings hope to marriage. It means there is always something more to know, always another way to become more intimate, to grow, to deepen your understanding of one another.
How Irreducibility Deepens Intimacy in Marriage
As two married, autonomous, irreducible individuals, you are bound to run into differences in thoughts, feelings, perspectives, and experiences. Discovering these differences will affect your behavior and how you interact with one another.[2]
The truth is that discovering these things will take a lifetime. No matter how long you have known each other, you will always surprise one another. This should not cause you to feel anxious or somehow inadequate as a spouse. Instead, this should encourage you to pursue one another continually.
Irreducibility brings vibrancy, mystery, and excitement. If you embrace it in your marriage, you will never be bored with your spouse. Instead, you will have a foundation for exploration, creativity, understanding, and intimacy between you.
The Gap Can Bring You Closer We’ve put together a downloadable PDF with practical strategies to bring these ideas into your daily lives. You’ll learn how to create small, meaningful moments of discovery and to open the door for bigger conversations about your dreams, goals, and hopes for the future. Join our Patreon, and get access to these strategies today.
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How To Make Autonomy and Irreducibility Work For You
Now that you know what autonomy and irreducibility are and the roles they play in marriage in general, here are some practical steps to see how they can deepen th...
Intimacy is something that everyone wants for their marriage. But achieving that requires risk. Because to deepen intimacy in your marriage, you will need to open up to your spouse, to be vulnerable.
Building Intimacy with Vulnerability
Intimacy is complex. It is not something that happens passively; you must work with your spouse to put it together. Vulnerability is a crucial piece, one of the four primary aspects working in sync as parts of the whole[1].
1. Irreducibility
Your spouse is not a puzzle you can solve. Whenever you think you know everything about them, you’ll always find something new. Irreducibility means respecting the fact that your spouse is a fully realized human being, with an infinite number of intricacies. Their emotions, thoughts, and motivations run incredibly deep and constantly change. No matter how long you’ve known them, they will always surprise you.
2. Curiosity
Knowing that you can’t fully comprehend your spouse does not stop you from trying. On the contrary, curiosity compels you to pursue them, to get to know them, to understand them. It’s the eternal pursuit of marriage to know and be known by one another. Every day of your relationship should be a dance, an adventure where you relish another chance to learn something new about each other.
3. Vulnerability
Humans crave connection. But fear of rejection and pain can cause you to close yourself off from others, to protect yourself. Because opening yourself up to another person means you are handing them the power to hurt you.
Marriage is different than other relationships. You committed to fight together, to depend on each other, to have each other’s back. You can’t have that deep connection to one another if you are not willing to be vulnerable. So try to let that person into the places you have shielded from others.
Yes, there is risk here. But this is where the payoff is. When another person can see you and accept you for who you truly are, you will find an incredibly deep, profound connection.
4. Empathy
Your spouse craves that connection as well. That’s why you married each other! By sharing in your spouse’s joy, sadness, pain, hopes, fears, and dreams, you can understand and accept them for who they are. You too will be able to empathize with them, to see the world from their perspective.
It’s beautiful when these aspects work together as you build intimacy with your spouse. Irreducibility lets you acknowledge that there is always something more to discover about each other. Curiosity drives you forward to learn it. Vulnerability allows each of you the opportunity to see more about the other. Empathy enables you to fulfill each other’s deep need for connection and acceptance.
This empathy you find when you are at your most vulnerable with each other is the very thing that will deepen your intimacy in marriage[2].
What Does Vulnerability Look Like?
Vulnerability in marriage means opening up to your spouse. It’s about allowing them to see and to share your emotions, experiences, needs, and beliefs. And a large part of confiding in them is opening yourself up to the possibility of being hurt.
Take Emotional Risks
By revealing yourself to your spouse, you allow them to decide how to react to your vulnerability. At that moment, they can choose to offer empathy, acceptance, and love, the very things you crave. They can also choose to reject or dismiss a part of you that you hold dear.
In giving them this opportunity, you are telling them that you trust them, that you believe the best in them. That despite your fear of being rejected, you are allowing them the opportunity to know you better. Confiding in your spouse despite the risk is essential to building intimacy with them.
However, you do need to be careful. Building risk is a process, and you can’t just jump to being 100% vulnerable all the time. You need to make sure to lay the groundwork necessary to grow together and deepe...
The Internet floods us with ideas, tips, and tricks for couples to grow in their relationship with God. Sifting through it all can get overwhelming. Which works and which doesn’t? Let’s separate the wheat from the chaff and look at the ideas that truly work.
Be Doers, Not Just Hearers
Couples who share religious faith experience higher overall marital satisfaction (Perry, 2015). So yes, being married to a fellow believer is great! But that’s just the beginning. You need to go beyond passively hearing about your beliefs and actively start to do what your belief tells you.
Research also has shown that when couples take specific spiritual actions together, they experience better marriages than just by sharing the same faith (Mahoney et al., 1999). If you want to strengthen your union, you need to take steps in your spiritual journey together.
As you grow in your shared faith, your marital satisfaction and quality go up. Marriage becomes healthier and more satisfying.
Is Personality a Factor?
It’s rare for couples to have the same personality and expression of spirituality as each other. And sometimes those differences can be discouraging. If you are shy, you might feel disheartened that you don’t seem to have the same energy for God as your extroverted spouse. If you’re more outgoing, you might think you’re spiritually shallow because your quieter spouse spends more time in personal prayer than you.
The apostle Paul addresses this in his letter to the Romans. He describes how you are different parts of the same body, that each of you has something unique to bring to the table. Recognizing that you “have gifts that differ according to the grace given” to you, Paul exhorts you “to exercise them accordingly” (Romans 12:6).
And research backs him up on this. Dyer & Luckey (1961) found that differences in personality type do not affect spirituality in marriage. There is no right personality type to grow spiritually, so you shouldn’t worry that your spiritual growth doesn’t look like your spouse’s. Instead, focus on what’s important: sharing your journey pursuing God.
How Couples Can Grow Spiritually
So what are some specific ways to grow in your relationship with the Lord as partners? Here are some easy, yet effective methods to accomplish this:
- Hold Weekly Check-Ins
Hectic schedules can easily cause you to forget to touch base with each other, so you might start to drift apart. To prevent this, Willford & Willford (2013) recommend that couples hold a weekly check-in. Consistency is vital because it shows your spouse that you are prioritizing and valuing this time with them.
In these check-ins, you should cover these important topics:
Celebrate the Wins. What were the highlights of your week? Share moments that gave you joy, and give your full attention to them when they share theirs. Rejoice in each others’ triumphs, remembering to thank God for these blessings.Share the Struggles. Be real with each other. Open up and share your frustrations and problems. Use the scheduled time to gather your thoughts so that you can have a healthy discussion on these difficult topics. Process together, and bring them before the Lord in prayer.Dream of the Future. What are you hoping? Planning? Where is God guiding you? As a couple, you need a glimpse of the future before you, to know that you are striving towards the same dream together.
When you make it a point to have these deep conversations with each other, you develop incredible intimacy, growing in your relationship together.
Forging a Stronger Marriage During Hard Times Once again we’ve created a bonus guide for our much-appreciated supporters. This week’s goes along with today’s show but focuses on forging a stronger marriage during hard times. If you want to get better as a couple at bringing the tough stuff to God, you’ll definitely appreciate this 3-page guide with Scripture and wisdom to help you navigate tough times together.
Cognitive biases are those sneaky little brain shortcuts that happen without us even realizing it. They make life more efficient and most of the time are helpful… but sometimes they can backfire too! Today we’ll look at three more of these biases so you know what they are, why they happen and how to stop them from messing with your marriage!
Reactance Bias
What Is This Cognitive Bias?
Gotta love this one: when you feel like someone is trying to force you to do something, you react by doing the exact opposite.
Why This Happens
Reactance happens when a person feels that their freedom to make choices is being threatened.
If you feel that your choice is being taken away, you are likely to act in a way that reaffirms your own ability to choose. Usually, by acting in a way that is the total opposite to what you were being pressured into[i].
Here’s an example of reactance in action: when the legal drinking age was increased from 18 to 21, research shows that young students aged 18 to 20 started to drink much MORE, as an act of defiance against the fact that they weren't allowed to drink any more. The fact that they were being told they weren’t allowed something just made them want it even more.
In marriage, this may happen when you demand that your spouse does something (e.g., helping with housework, cutting down on some unhealthy behavior, spending more time with the family, etc.), and they feel like their freedom is being threatened. Quite often, they will react negatively by taking even less care of the house, or spending more time away, and so on[ii].
What To Do About It
The first step is to recognize when this bias is at work within yourself. You can learn to challenge this whenever it occurs and we have more on this in the bonus guide for today’s episode.
If you are married to someone who is quite prone to reactance bias, you can also learn to phrase your request differently. Research shows that that there are ways to phrase requests so that they are less likely to trigger reactance bias. These ways are[iii]:
Use less threatening language: instead of "you have to" or "you must” or “I need you to", try "could you" or "I'd like you to"Add a 'postscript' to your request: adding phrases to the end of your request that make it seem like more of a choice. Eg "it's up to you, but it would really mean a lot to me" or "only if it isn't too much trouble”. If you notice, these post scripts underscore that you’re giving your spouse the option to choose.Empathy: help them see why this particular is an issue for you and allow them to see it from your perspective. This is so your spouse can want to help instead of feeling like they have to help.
Mood Bias
What Is This Cognitive Bias?
When judgments and actions related to your marriage are influenced by your current mood. And this occurs even if your mood has nothing to do with the current situation.
Why This Happens
Emotions, decisions and memories are all linked in the brain. When we are feeling one particular emotion, the brain activates memories and thoughts that fit with the current mood, and dampens memories/thoughts that do not fit with it[iv].
This can cause your mood to affect the way you relate to your spouse, even if the source of your mood has nothing to do with your marriage. Let me give you some examples tied to various brain functions:
Memory: feeling sad or angry causes you to recall more sad and angry memories and makes it harder for you to recall happy memories[v]. For example, if you come home from work feeling frustrated it will be easier to recall things your spouse has done that frustrate you. See how your mood has nothing to do with the current situation? But can impact your marriage?Attention: feeling anxious or down causes you to focus your attention onto things that fit with these emotions[vi]. For example, if you are feeling sad you are more likely to focus on the negative things your spouse does than ...
Cognitive biases are assumptions and judgments and error that our brains automatically make without us even knowing it’s happening. They are like automatic mental shortcuts. But the problem is: they could be messing with your marriage without either of you even realizing it!
We have a brainy episode for you this week. We’re going to be talking about cognitive biases in marriage. This is about how your brain gets in the way of your connection with one another, and how to deal with that.
What Is Cognitive Bias?
As we pointed out in the intro, biases are assumptions, judgments and errors which our brains automatically make without us knowing. Often they are "shortcuts" the brain takes to help us process information and make decisions more quickly. Biases are not necessarily bad nor are they a sign of mental illness (although they do get stronger when we are stressed or experiencing anxiety/depression), and often they are useful[i].
But sometimes they can influence our thinking in unhelpful ways without us knowing. These biases can impact all areas of life, including marriage. So it’s good to know about them, why they happen, how they affect us and what to do about it.
The Spotlight Effect and The Illusion of Transparency
What Is This Cognitive Bias?
The spotlight effect is "the tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which they believe that others see and attend to their external appearance"[ii]. Essentially it means you expect people to notice things about you (like how you look) and notice things you do (both good and bad) far more than they actually do.
This was originally tested by a study done in 2000[iii] by asking study participants to walk through a crowded cafeteria while wearing an embarrassing t shirt. The participants expected that everyone would notice them and judge them for wearing a silly shirt, but in actual fact hardly anyone noticed or cared. That’s overestimating the extent to which others notice your appearance.
The illusion of transparency is similar, but to do with our thoughts rather than our outward actions. It is the "tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which their internal thoughts, feelings, and attitudes ‘leak out’ and are seen by others.[iv] We expect others to be able to read our thoughts and emotions a lot more clearly than they actually do. This is also sometimes called the "mind reading bias" because we expect people to be able to read our minds much more accurately than they really can.
Why This Happens
Our actions, thoughts and appearance are always obvious to us than to others. So when we do something embarrassing we expect it to be just as obvious to everyone else. Equally, if we do something good or succeed at something, we expect everyone else to notice and can become annoyed when they don’t. Or when we see something a certain way, it is abundantly clear to us and we expect others to be just as lucid.
How This Cognitive Bias Affects Marriage
These two effects can lead to increased anxiety: thinking that your spouse is scrutinizing your appearance and thoughts can lead to high anxiety and over-compensating by trying to mask your emotions. Eg "I have to look my best all the time or my spouse will notice and think I'm not making any effort" or "If he/she notices I'm upset it will upset him/her too, so I need to make sure it doesn't show"
They can lead to feeling unappreciated: thinking that your experiences are obvious to your spouse can leave you feeling unappreciated when they don't react. Eg "He didn't even notice my new hairstyle" or "I was obviously upset and he/she didn't even ask why"
They can also contribute to poor conflict resolution. Thinking that your grievances are obvious to your spouse can lead to conflict avoidance or passive-aggressive behavior. E.g., "I shouldn't have to tell him/her why I'm upset! it should be obvious!"
What To Do About It
Say what you're thinking.
So what if you are in a marriage that you are totally committed to but really not enjoying or appreciating. You are unhappy but it is quite a stable situation. And you aren’t leaving. How can you make the most of this situation? We’ll look at how folks find themselves in a spot like this and how to make the most of it.
Long Term Unhappy Marriages
Let’s start by looking at what we mean by “unhappy” in this situation. Overall marital quality is a combination of marital satisfaction and marital stability[i]. Using these two dimensions you can categorize marriages into four groups:
High satisfaction, high stabilityHigh satisfaction, low stabilityLow satisfaction, high stabilityLow satisfaction, low stability
Long term unhappy marriages fall into the third category: low in satisfaction but high in stability.
Why Do People Stay?
There are various reasons people may choose to stay in an unhappy marriage, divided into "reasons for staying" and "barriers to leaving" (from Heaton & Albrecht, 1991)
Reasons to Stay
Economic: you may be financially much better off even if you aren't happy in the marriageFamiliarity: even if you aren't truly happy in your marriage, after many years together you may appreciate the stability and routine of lifeBelief that marriage is sacred: your religious commitment to marriage may keep you there.
Barriers to Leaving
Fear of being single or not being able to find another spouseStigma around divorceInability or doubts about your ability to fend for yourself (e.g., if your spouse is the main earner or handles important household issues and you don't know how you'd cope without them)Not wanting to distress your children by separating (even adult children).
Growing Your Marriage by Growing Yourself Once again we’ve created a bonus worksheet for our much-appreciated supporters. This week’s worksheet complements this episode by stepping you through two very important areas to consider in a situation like this. First of all, we help you search for the positive reasons for staying. This subtle shift can make a huge difference in your marital satisfaction all by itself. But then we also ask you to consider how you might challenge yourself to grow in a situation like this. Again, this is a positive reframe that will help you make shifts within yourself. And we have often seen that when this happens, your marriage will often shift to a better place as well. So if you are feeling hopeless and looking for a place to start, you’ll definitely want to get this worksheet. You can get it by becoming a patron of The Marriage Podcast for Smart People.
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How To Make The Most of It
Find Positive Reasons to Stay
This first point is to do with a change in your mindset, rather than trying to change your circumstances. A research study from 2004[ii] interviewed unhappy couples about why they stay together. They found that couples whose only reasons to stay together were barriers to leaving were much more likely to end up divorced.
So you need to try and find positive reasons to stay together, rather than thinking you have no choice. For example, wanting to stay in the marriage because you believe that God values your marriage and values your efforts to stay together is a better way of thinking about things than only staying together because you believe divorce is sinful. That’s putting a more positive slant on the reason for staying. This slight shift can have a big impact.
It's Better Than Divorce
Couples may be able to take comfort from the fact that staying together is often better for you than divorce. A research study from 2002[iii] found that, even in unhappily married couples, divorce generally did not increase their levels of happiness or life satisfaction. So sticking together and working on issues is often the best thing to do.
Don't Disengage
Couples in an unhappy marriage often end up withdrawing away from each other.
Most times when Christian podcasters take up a topic like this we tend to get preachy about not entering into an unequal yoke, where you have a Christian marrying a non-Christian. While we fully agree with the truth of Scripture on that subject, in this episode we want to look at this issue more from the perspective of how to best face this issue as a couple when you find yourselves in a marriage where you don’t share your religious values, or even don’t share convictions about your faith to nearly the same degree.
Religious Values Are Good For Marriage
Just as a quick disclaimer around terminology — we are born again Christians who believe that salvation is faith in Jesus Christ. We believe that Biblical Christianity is a faith, not a religion. In other words, the blessing that God has for Christians comes through faith in Christ, not through a set of religious practices, law-keeping or following a set of rules. Which translates into the fact that we don’t think of our faith as a religion, nor do we normally call our faith-based practices “religious practices”.
However, in the research literature, nearly all studies lump anything to do with God or faith under this term “religion” or “religious views” or “religious practices”. So for the sake of keeping things simple, we are just going to roll with the most commonly used terminology in the research journals.
To start off then, there is strong evidence that religious views and spirituality have positive effects on marriage. There are a number of reasons for this[i]:
Christianity promotes positive values like love, faithfulness, patience, forgiveness and kindness, all of which are good for marriageChristianity also encourages positive behaviors, such as putting your spouse's needs before your own, resolving conflict positively, and regularly connecting through joint prayer and church attendanceChristianity teaches that marriage is sacred, meaning that those with religious beliefs are more likely to remain faithful and committed to the marriage over their whole lifeChristians often have stronger support networks than non-Christians (from their church communities), giving them more people to turn to for support and guidance
All of this means that when both spouses are of the same faith, and both place high importance on their religious values, marital satisfaction is normally high[ii].
When Your Religious Beliefs Don’t Align
Misaligned values can occur when one spouse is very committed to their faith and the other isn't, when one spouse is religious and the other isn't, or when spouses are committed to different religions. All of these situations can impact the marriage, but probably not for the reasons you would expect.
Reduced Positive Behaviors
Now just note as we go through this that we are dealing with studies of the general population. So I’ll say something like, non-religious people will probably display less actions that are good for the marriage. Note the tentative language: “will probably”. Please don’t be offended if you are non-religious — we are reporting on statistical issues here and you may well be an exception. We acknowledge that there are highly religious people who are terrible marriage partners. And we acknowledge that there are non-religious people who are devoted, loving and magnificent spouses.
We aren’t making global statements. We are just pointing out general trends in a population. If you are an exception, great. If you are not, I hope you’ll make some room to consider what the research is saying and think about how you might apply this thing to your marriage, as we do to ours.
Generally, spirituality leads to attitudes and actions that are good for marriage. If one spouse is non-religious or less committed to their faith, they will probably display less of these attitudes and actions.
This was tested by a research study in 2015[iii], who interviewed couples where one spouse placed high importance on thei...
Today we navigate the thorny territory of physical attractiveness and what happens when you feel like you’re just not attracted anymore. The answer to this dilemma is maybe not what you would expect!
So you’ve been married a while, maybe twenty years or more. And maybe you’re finding that your spouse is settling into middle age and no longer taking care of themselves physically. And you still love them, but you’re finding it harder and harder to be attracted to them, at least on a physical level. This is a common enough challenge.
Does Physical Attractiveness Affect Marriage?
Research generally shows that there is a link between how attractive you perceive your spouse to be and how satisfied you are with the marriage[i]. This effect is generally much more pronounced for men than for women. Probably because we are socialized that way.
What happens as couples get older? Husband’s perception of their wife’s attractiveness appears to remain important, but this factor becomes less important for women over time. Here are three studies that looked into this issue: Meltzer et al[ii] in 2014 found that for the first 4 years of marriage, physical attractiveness of your spouse was a strong predictor of marital satisfaction for men, and a less important predictor for women.
Murstein & Christy[iii] back in 1976 investigated the same thing in middle aged couples who had been married for between 10 and 20 years. The physical attractiveness of their wife was still an important predictor of satisfaction for men but the reverse was not true for women in this age group. This was also true for older couples who had been married for 30+ years according to Peterson & Miller, in a study from 1980[iv]. So attractiveness does remain important on some level throughout marriage, normally moreso for the guys, but not always.
What about when one spouse becomes less attractive or "lets him/herself go"? Couples normally rate themselves as being equal in terms of attractiveness at all stages of life[v]. This means that a young couple might both decide they are not supermodels or anything but they are both a solid 7 out of 10. Maybe 20 years later they give themselves a 5. Maybe in their golden years a 2 or 3 — but generally in a couple each spouse will give themselves an equal score to their spouse.
However, when this was not the case and one spouse lets him or herself go or becomes less attractive in their spouse's eyes, the researchers noted that this normally does not impact marital quality[vi].
That comes as a bit of a surprise, right? Let’s look at it in a bit more detail.
How Is Attraction NOT Linked to Marital Quality?
The reason declines in physical attractiveness tend not to impact marital quality is that attraction is based on much more than physical appearance. Attraction to your spouse is partly physical but is also strongly determined by the levels of intimacy in your marriage, the emotional connection between you, the quality of time spent together, your attentiveness to one another, the level of support your spouse offers, your self esteem, the frequency of sex and other relationship factors[vii].
In other words, attraction is a multi-dimensional experience. This makes sense, of course, although I think the truth of this is obscured in a pornified culture. In a pornified culture you are led to believe that the most attractive person offers the best sexual experience. In reality, a lifetime of developing all these beautiful facets of marriage (emotional, spiritual, relational) are what culminate in the best sexual experience.
That is a lovely concept and a true one that we should all strive for. But the flip side is also true: that if you are less attracted to your partner, while you may have fixated on their physical appearance, it is much more likely that the overall marital quality is just not there. In other words, you are frustrated with your spouse, or resentful, or disappointed, or upset.
More than 1 in 6 people regularly work shifts outside of the normal Monday to Friday work week[i]. In today’s episode we want to look at some of the unique challenges that shiftwork can bring to marriage. And not only the challenges but how you can work together as a couple to make the most of life even when it is hard to see each other due to one or both of you being involved in shift work.
About 17% of workers regularly work in shifts outside the regular work week[ii]. Lots of folks have learned to make this work and we know a number of friends and family members who have been long term shift workers and have had successful marriages over the long term. However, it definitely presents some challenges and can lead to increased conflict. Let’s begin by looking at some of the problem areas associated with shift work and marriage.
How Shift Work Affects Marriage
Shift work can create a unique and extreme form of work-family conflict: where the roles and responsibilities of your job and your marriage start to negatively impact each other.
Shift work can affect marriage in three main ways[iii]:
Competition: this is where the two roles of career and family life compete for your time and energy so that you have to sacrifice parts of one in order for the other to function well. In shift work this normally means the family life has to suffer so that you can continue to function at work. Shift work typically disrupts normal sleep patterns making it harder to spend time with your spouse and family. Poor sleep can also harm your mood, energy levels and physical health, which can reduce the quality of the time you do get to spend together. If you’ve been working all night you might now always be in the best mood to chat when you get home!
Spillover: this happens when low mood, fatigue and other negative effects spill over from work to home, or from home to work. In shift work this often happens when tiredness and low mood from the job are brought home, leading to negative interactions with your spouse at home. Negativity at home can then spill over into the work life, creating a cycle.
Compensation: this is where you invest more in one of your roles to compensate for the fact that the other role isn't going well. For example, people whose marriages are not going well may invest more into their work and derive their happiness and satisfaction from their career instead. Some research[iv] suggests that people in distressed marriages sometimes seek out shift work in order to avoid facing their spouses and dealing with their marital problems. This of course leads to further distancing and breakdown in communication.
Now, these impacts do not have to happen. They are not inevitable. But they are some of the common challenges that shift work presents to marriage. And any or all of them can happen at the same time.
Your Shift Pattern Matters
What is interesting to note is that the overall impact on marriage depends very much on what your shift pattern is. "Shift work" in the research can mean anything from occasionally working weekends to consistently working nights or anything in between.
Generally research finds that all forms of shift work can have a negative impact on areas of marriage such as overall happiness, positive interactions, levels of conflict and sexual satisfaction[v]. But different kinds of shift work were found to have different levels of impact. These are, from least impactful to most:
Weekend workFast rotating shifts (eg 3 days nights followed by 3 days daytime work)Slow rotating shifts (eg 1-2 weeks working nights followed by 1-2 weeks working days)Long-term night shifts
The faster rotating shifts make it easier for couples to get into a rhythm and still see each other fairly regularly on a week by week basis, whereas the longer rotating shifts and night shifts make regular time together much harder. Shorter shift patterns are also less disruptive to the
Having a fight with your spouse is a stressful, upsetting experience that can leave you bewildered, frustrated and feeling stuck. In this episode, we want to give you a straightforward strategy that you can use to help break yourselves out of a downward spiral of increasing conflict and unhappiness.
The Issue: Rumination and Negative Cycles
A single argument is unlikely to have huge negative effects on a marriage. The problem is that after an argument couples tend to ruminate over it for a long time. You might keep going over and reliving the arguments in your minds, causing you to feel upset and angry with your spouse all over again.
Sometimes you will get "stuck" in this rumination to the point where a single fight can continue to affect you for a long time afterwards[i].
That’s an issue because this leads to negative reciprocity. Meaning, next time there is the possibility of conflict, one or both of you are still feeling angry about the previous fight. You therefore react more strongly to the current issue and you may bring up past hurts as well, causing the conflict to escalate. Perhaps your spouse says something hurtful or brings up a past annoyance, and you retaliate in kind. This happens more and more as time goes on[ii].
Don’t miss this point: this pattern of negative rumination and reciprocity has been identified as the biggest reason that marital quality declines over time as a result of conflict[iii]. It’s not the fight itself that damages your marriage: it’s the way you hold onto the hurt and keep bringing it up again and again. Rumination and holding on to past hurts also has negative personal consequences such as low mood, higher stress levels, higher blood pressure and reduced physical health[iv]. So it has cascading effects to other parts of your wellbeing.
The Best Thing To Do After a Fight: Break This Negative Cycle
Stopping this cycle of rumination and reciprocity lets the negative feelings end when the fight ends.
This means that the negativity and upset stop affecting your mood and will not influence how you react next time a potential conflict situation arises. Letting go of rumination also makes it much easier to make up with your spouse and resolve the conflict issue[v].
You will not always be able to prevent conflict from happening, but by breaking this cycle you can "draw a line" after it happens to ensure it does not keep affecting you.
Ok, you’re sold: now, how do you do this?
How To Break The Negative Cycle
1) Cool Off
Immediately after a fight our brains tend to be in self defense "fight or flight" mode, which makes thinking calmly and rationally very difficult. That’s the normal physiological response to a distressing event. To compensate for that, give yourselves time to cool off before you come back together to resolve the issue[vi].
For Christian couples, prayer can be a good way to help cool off from an argument as well. Research has shown that this can also make conflict resolution easier[vii].
Praying Through Conflict Once again we’ve created a bonus guide for our much-appreciated supporters. This one looks more closely at how you can use prayer to strategically intervene in the conflict you’re experiencing by bringing you a healthier mindset, calming yourself down, and finding the wisdom you need in order to reconcile. You can get this by becoming a patron of The Marriage Podcast for Smart People.
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2) Reappraise The Conflict
The best way to stop yourself getting stuck in rumination and bitterness is to think back over the argument from a different perspective and reappraise what happened. A research study from 2013[viii] tested this by training couples to imagine what their argument would have looked like if a neutral friend was watching them.
Here’s what they taught their study participants: "Think about this disagreement with your partner from the perspective of a neutral third party
Today’s episode is on the lighter side. But did you know that researchers have actually done studies on the phenomenon of the man cold or man flu? You may be wondering if it’s really worse for a man to have a cold than for a woman? Well: like we say every time, we have the research, the truth and the answers you’re looking for!
That’s right, today we’re going to be talking about the very serious and culturally under-acknowledged and deeply stigmatized issue of man colds.
Do Men Suffer More Than Woman?
Funny enough, there have been a few research journal articles published on the man cold or man flu phenomenon. There was a joke article published in the British Medical Journal where a researcher tried to establish whether men were immunologically inferior or if they were just wimps. Fast forwarding to the conclusion, the researcher from the University of Alberta suggested that “Perhaps now is the time for male friendly spaces, equipped with enormous televisions and reclining chairs, to be set up where men can recover from the debilitating effects of man flu in safety and comfort"[i].
Another Research Group Responds
Not content to let the issue lie, another group of researchers (who perhaps had too much time on their hands)[ii] wrote in to the British Medical Journal with their own investigation. "Being men ourselves, and having had several near death experiences enduring the flu, we were intrigued by the same question as Dr. Sue."
In their study 15 men and 15 women were injected with a flu virus and their responses were measured. They found that women have a stronger immune response to the virus than men, meaning that women naturally recover from colds and flu more quickly while men suffer from them more severely. "We indeed found that the male subjects did not erect shelves, maintain cars or attend a football match (or engaged in reproductive activities for that matter) directly following [our] study, illustrating how inflammation may affect social life.[iii]".
So some (not all) research shows that men may experience cold and flu symptoms more severely. But they may also communicate their illness in different ways. A study from 2018[iv] found that men and women "moaned and complained equally" when ill with cold symptoms but that men had a tendency to sigh and take long deep breaths more often. This perhaps suggests a tendency to exaggerate symptom severity.
Overall research suggests that men may experience cold and flu more severely due to women having a stronger immune response. I think this warrants some sympathy!
How To Help Your Ill Spouse
It is interesting to follow this gender issue further. We’ll give you some practical info to help be that caring wife that you always wanted to be!
Get Him To The Doctor!
Men are much less likely to seek medical help regarding illnesses than women[v], or may seek help but do so much later once symptoms have gotten worse. This is thought to be due to "traditionally masculine beliefs" about wanting to cope with illness on your own and being reluctant to seek help. So if your husband is complaining about illness but refusing to do anything about it, get him to a doctor!
Be Sympathetic, But Not Too Sympathetic
This one is interesting. Research from 2018[vi] found that your expectations of how severe an illness will be can actually impact how severe it is. Expecting an illness to be very severe can lead to negative mood and anxiety, and these can increase the severity of the symptoms you feel. So when comforting your spouse you want to be sympathetic and supportive, but making too big a deal of the illness can make it worse.
A Health Check for your Marriage Once again we’ve created a bonus guide for our much-appreciated supporters who are sensitive to the immunological vulnerabilities of men and understand they truly need a little extra care. Turns out that your physical health is linked to your marital health so we want to help you with a m...
Thankfully, losing a child is a relatively rare event. However, this tragedy still happens to some in our world. And one of the common concerns I hear expressed is concern for the marriage of those who have lost a child. There seems to be a real perception that couples who lose a child are more likely to experience the failure of their marriage. We explore the research on this today and then turn towards helping each other through the grief.
Many people and researchers describe losing a child as the hardest thing a couple could go through[i] and we certainly would agree with this.
How Losing a Child Impacts Marriage
Bereaved parents experience intense and overwhelming grief at their loss, and have to cope with substantial changes to their life, their role, and their relationship. Parents have to deal with their own individual grief as well as attempting to comfort each other and deal with the changes to their relationship.
This is a subject we wanted to address here but we have to be up front that we have never been through this ourselves. Others have and there are helpful blogs and articles on the Internet from those who speak to this issue from a very personal place. Our approach here is different: we wanted to look at the research and see what happens not just in the life of this couple or that couple, but across the experiences of many marriages to see what could be learned.
Losing a Child Doesn’t Increase Divorce Rates
There’s no doubt that this loss can potentially have a huge impact on marital quality, but research finds no link between the loss of a child and marital stability.
So the idea that losing a child makes divorce more likely is in fact a myth[ii]. But it can definitely impact marriage in other ways, such as:Increased strain and conflictReduced communicationDistancingReduced sexual functioning
Despite the extreme grief of losing a child, not all couples experience these negative outcomes: setting the grief and loss itself to one side for the moment, some couples end up stronger as a result of a tragedy like this. This is partly down to situational factors (things outside the couple's control, see below), partly down to how the couple grieves, and partly down to how strong the couple were before the loss.
Situational Factors
Cause of death: we want to be cautious about comparing the cause of death knowing that each case is so unique. But generally, losing a child in sudden or violent circumstances such as accidents, homicide or suicide is much more distressing to the marriage than other causes such as illness or stillbirth[iii].
Age at death: the older a child is when they die, the more the parents have invested in them and formed strong bonds with them, so the harder their loss impacts them[iv]
Other children: having other children can be a source of comfort when one child is lost, and provide a continued sense of purpose for the couple[v]. However, it can also increase the strain on the couple as they have to care for their surviving children at the same time as dealing with their own grief[vi].
State of The Marriage At The Time of Loss
The quality of your marriage prior to the loss can impact how you cope with the loss, for good or bad. For example, if your marriage has been child-centred, you may not have nurtured a strong bond between yourselves and so probably start the grieving process more alone. Hopefully, you would both be able to recognize the need to turn towards each other during a time like this.
But pre-existing strains and conflicts before the loss of the child can also lead to couples coping poorly with the bereavement. Couples who struggled with poor communication and conflict prior to the loss are unable to properly comfort and support each other during the grieving process, and so end up becoming distanced and non-communicative rather than facing the problem together.
This can lead to a breakdown in the stability of the marriage[vii]
The classic domestic abuse scenario is a husband beating his wife. I think almost all of society gets that and understands it’s wrong. Then you have husbands that are emotionally and psychologically abusive: people are still struggling to accept this as a form of domestic violence, but more and more are understanding this is a severely devastating problem for a wife. But today we are going to cover the least well known and least understood situation: the abusive wife. As it turns out, women are capable of the same mindset and actions that abusive men are capable of.
How Common Are Male Victims of Abuse?
It turns out this is a difficult question to answer as abuse towards men is underreported and underbelieved (yes, I just invented a new word there: what I mean is that when a man reports abuse he is not as likely to be believed as a woman reporting the same).
What do we know about the stats? A research study from 2008[i] found that 19% of reported domestic violence cases involved a male victim. Another study from 2010[ii] found that for every 1000 people in the American population, 3.8 women and 1.3 men will be victims of partner abuse each year, making female victims of abuse roughly three times more common than male.
However, these stats do not give the whole story. Western society is still fairly patriarchal in the sense that men are assumed to be in a position of power over women in most contexts, including marriage. This means that abuse is normally thought of as an abuse of that power, inflicted by men upon women. The idea that a woman could physically or emotionally abuse a man does not fit with this worldview that the man is the powerful head of the house[iii].
This means that men will very rarely admit to being victims of abuse, for fear of humiliation, being labeled as cowardly and weak, or not being taken seriously. The fact that very few men admit to being abuse victims leads much of society to think that it does not happen, making it even harder for male victims to be taken seriously[iv].
Many Reactions Are Unhelpful
In addition to being a hidden, shame-inducing problem, men who do come forward about abuse from their wives are often ignored, disbelieved or even suspected of abuse themselves when they do come forward. Since much of society views abuse through a patriarchal lens, the idea of male victims is inconceivable.
This means that for male victims, their family and friends may not believe the abuse is really happening, or downplay how serious it is. This can also happen when men take their allegations to social services or to the police. Research from 2004[v] found that 35% of abused men were ignored by the police and 21% were arrested themselves, since the police assumed the wife must have been attacked herself and acted in self-defense.
With this issue of under-reporting and disbelief in mind, a large study from 2014[vi] reviewed over 200 studies and concluded that abusive wives may in fact be just as common as abusive husbands.
What Does Female-Perpetrated Abuse Look Like?
Abuse directed at men can take many forms and is in most ways very similar to abuse directed at women. A study from 2004[vii] interviewed 100 abused husbands and found all the different types of abuse were present:
Physical abuse: men reported being kicked, threatened with weapons, burned or scalded, stabbed, and other forms of violenceEmotional and psychological: verbal abuse, belittling, threats and aggressionSocial: controlling where the husband goes, not letting him see other people or not letting him interact with the childrenEconomic: denying access to food/money etc
Since abuse is largely the same regardless of gender, all the mind games, manipulation and control issues that apply to abusive husbands also apply to abusive wives. Psychological impact on abused men is also similar to its effect on women, but with an added component of shame at being a victim of
Who knew that something as generic as generosity could transform your marriage? It has the potential to increase marital quality, make conflict resolution easier, increase your own happiness, help you to see other people’s perspectives, decrease divorce risk... Basically, make everything better except for my poor finger...
Today, we’re offering some variety! I (Caleb) injured my finger and while it is not exactly life threatening (like such horrors as a man cold), I am not supposed to type. Sooo, this week Verlynda has gone through the research and written up this episode. Wasn’t it just last week we had an iTunes review asking for more input from Verlynda? Well, here you are! Ok, let’s get into the topic of generosity. What Is Generosity? Bear with me while we go through some boring definitions, but they really do lay the foundation for looking at how generosity affects marriage.
Marital generosity is defined as "giving good things to one's spouse freely and abundantly[i]". Generosity is considered a "marital virtue": a character trait and personal strength which naturally leads a person to act in ways that are good for the marriage[ii].
More practically speaking, within marriage, generosity can be seen as investing in the relationship with behaviors such as putting your spouse’s needs above your own, and freely giving of your time, effort and energy without any thought of personal gain[iii]. What Effect does Generosity Have on Marriage? I think it’s obvious to say that generosity will have a positive impact on marriage. What I thought was neat though, was it had a positive impact both for the person acting generously and for their spouse. This is a win-win!
Generosity often feels good and satisfying personally. It also increases your spouse's happiness and makes them more likely to act generously in return. So even though generosity shouldn't be motivated by personal gain, people do still benefit from it.
Here’s a blurb from the research: generosity increases marital satisfaction for both spouses, reduces marital conflict and is negatively correlated with risk of divorce[iv]. These effects are true for both husbands and wives but are normally more pronounced in women. So, who wouldn’t want to add a little more generosity into their repertoire?
Generous acts also serve to protect the marriage from stresses such as financial pressure. A study from 2018[v] found that a husband's levels of generosity mediated the link between economic hardship and his wife's levels of marital quality.
Here’s something about generosity that I found really interesting. Generosity is related to specific acts that a person does for their spouse, but it is also a state of mind which affects how they see and relate to the world[vi]. Both aspects are important.
First, let’s talk about the acts or behaviors, and then we’ll look into the mind piece. Acts of Generosity Here are four key ways that the research[vii] gives to show generosity to one’s spouse. These are:
small, everyday acts of kindness expressions of respect displays of affection willingness to forgive
These four kinds of generosity were linked to higher marital satisfaction for both spouses, reduced conflict and reduced divorce risk.
Generosity and the Love Languages
Once again we’ve created a bonus guide for our much appreciated patrons. This week we’re looking at how to practically inject more generosity into your marriage, taking into account the love languages you and your spouse respond best to. If you want to make sure your generosity really hits the mark then you’ll want to pick up this guide. You can get this by becoming a patron of The Marriage Podcast for Smart People.
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Household labor! This is another important area that marital generosity impacts. Research from 2012[viii] found a link between generosity and willingness to share household and childcare labor. Deciding to share these jobs fairly (rather than doing them out of obliga...
When a spouse is being abused, one of the challenges they may have to face is that other people around them may not believe that they are being abused. When this happens, there are even fewer resources available to empower the person experiencing the abuse. Let’s look at how this happens and then what to do about it.
We wanted to bring this topic forward today because social support is a vital support for helping women recover from all forms of abuse[i]. However, when a woman is in a genuinely abusive situation and her support network do not understand the severity of the problem, then she feels even more isolated and stuck in the abusive relationship[ii].
Often the abuser is pretty slick and he has maybe convinced others — even her own family — that’s she’s having mental health issues or is just not stable or not rational. So you can imagine how profoundly trapped a woman might feel in this kind of situation. It really shakes her core sense of reality and truth.
We hope that with this episode you’ll have some real clarity and also a bit of plan for how to navigate your way through this. What Is Emotional Abuse? We have covered the definition of abuse before, but a quick review of the main factors of emotional abuse is in order[iii]:
Threats: these can be overt threats to harm you, your children or your family in any way. It includes threats to withhold basic needs: food, healthcare, financial support, safety, etc. Control: control or placing restrictions on your life. This could include things like depriving you of sleep, denying you access to friends, support, money, food or transportation. Destabilization: ongoing intimidation, insults, degradation or trying to convince you that you are inferior and undeserving of better treatment.
One-off instances of these behaviors are not necessarily a sign of emotional abuse. A study from 2013[iv] states that for these actions to cross over from bad marital behavior to abusive behavior then it must reoccur repeatedly, without the abuser showing any sign of responsibility for or awareness of the issue. Common Mistakes Others Make Even counselors may not always see the abuse for what it is. A study from 2010[v] gives a helpful list of reasons why therapists may miss identifying abuse, and these are reasons that other people in your support network may be prone to as well:
Failing to recognize that emotional abuse is an act of violence just as physical abuse is. Not having an understanding of patriarchy, power and gender can lead to blindness toward abuse. Holding you in any way responsible for your husband’s pervasive pattern of abuse
In the context of helping someone see the abuse you’re experiencing, you may need to educate them on one or more of these issues. Referring them to articles such as ours on abuse, or giving them good books such as “The Verbally Abusive Relationship” by Patricia Evans or “Why Does He Do That?” by Lundy Bancroft may help them begin to see the issue.
On the other hand, if you come from a family where all of the men operate in a patriarchal mindset it may be impossible to involve them as resources in your support network. Instead, you may choose to turn to others who already are better prepared to understand the abuse and confront it alongside you. Why Do Others Not See the Abuse? They Only See the Good Abuse normally occurs in a simple cycle. You have a period of abuse followed by reconciliation and then a honeymoon period where the abuser is especially kind and loving. Since the actual abuse is normally only done in private, other people only see the honeymoon phase where the abuser appears to be a perfect, even doting, spouse[vi]. Mind Games and Justification Abusive husbands are often very good at belittling their spouses, damaging their self-esteem and convincing them that the abuse is their own fault. Abused women can often be so disoriented by suffering abuse from the person they love that they end up rationalizing or...
In today’s show, we’ll dive into the nitty gritty of victim mode: what’s really happening and why people even go there. If your spouse or if you yourself ever fall into victim mode you’ll also learn how to deal with it so that you can find healthier ways of relating to one another and overcoming the challenges that life brings.
What is Victim Mode? Victim mode or victim mentality is where a person going through difficult situations views themselves as a helpless victim unable to do anything about their circumstances. People with victim mentality blame other people or outside forces for their suffering and believe they are helpless to prevent bad things happening[i]. Understanding Victim Mentality To understand the victim mentality you have to understand the concept called locus of control (LOC). Internal LOC means that you believe you have the power to affect situations and circumstances. When you have this internal LOC you know and understand that your actions determine how successful you are with regards to the life challenges that arise.
An external LOC means that you tend to see other people or random chance as being the driving forces in your life and you likely believe you have little power over them.
Victim mentality is linked to an external LOC: people with this mindset believe that bad things happen to them, and while they are not to blame, they are also powerless to do anything about it[ii].
If your spouse struggles with this, s/he also is likely to have very anxious and negative views about themselves and the world around them. Your spouse probably believes that bad things happen specifically to them, that their situation is uniquely bad, and that attempts to help them will fail[iii]. This can lead your spouse to be passive and apathetic about solving their problems and instead expecting other people to "rescue" them. Probably you. Victim Mode Becomes Self-Fulfilling This mentality can often create situations where the person in victim mode ends up becoming a victim. Think of it this way: if someone expects bad things to happen, and thinks there is nothing they can do about it, they will make no effort to prevent bad things from actually happening… since it is what they were expecting all along. Now you have a greater risk of victimization and the belief is reinforced because the greater probability of victimization means something bad is more likely to happen.
Not only is it self-fulfilling, but when people in victim mode ask for help, they will often reject other people's attempts to help them. They see their situation as hopeless so dismiss any suggestions of how to solve the problem or even react with hostility[iv]. This causes the person who was attempting to help them to withdraw, leading the person with victim mentality to conclude that they were right all along and they cannot be helped. This is where you as a spouse may really find yourself running into a brick wall: you cannot even help your spouse help him/herself. Then There’s Secondary Gains This is level 2 kind of stuff, so we’re going deeper here. I often ask folks in counseling — when they’re doing something that appears to be unhelpful — “How is that actually helpful for you? if you set all judgment aside for a moment?"
A couple researchers that studied this argued that people often unconsciously keep themselves in victim mode because there are some hidden benefits that come along with the unhappiness it brings. In other words, it kinda works or helps in a unique way. For example, acting like a disempowered victim may lead to a spouse showing more affection and attention as they try to comfort the victim. Or, believing yourself to be powerless may mean that you don't have to accept responsibility for the harm you are causing yourself/others. These are referred to as "secondary gains": the beneficial things that come as a result of bad things happening to you.
Note that this is all subconscious: people with victim mentality aren't delibera...
Did you know that one-third of all childbirths in the USA are as a result of unexpected pregnancies[i]? Now: that is not necessarily unexpected with regards to married couples — that’s just unexpected across the entire population so that’s in any relational context. Still, it’s a huge percentage.
Unexpected Pregnancy Woes and Blessings There is quite a variety of ways unexpected pregnancy can affect a couple: both positive and negative[ii]:
Reduced mental health (especially for the mother) Lower quality relationship with the child Lower quality relationship with spouse Negative impact on the mother’s career trajectory (having to quit a job or take reduced hours)
However, many couples also experience positive outcomes from the pregnancy such as:
Increased happiness Increased relationship quality Increased self-worth and sense of meaning in life
You can see that these outcomes are the opposite of each other. So there are lots of personal and marital factors which can determine whether an unexpected pregnancy becomes a positive or negative. I don’t doubt that in some cases there are also a mixture of positives and negatives. The question becomes: how can we make this a positive? Transition to Parenthood If it’s your first, becoming a parent is the start of a major new life role, which will drastically alter your life and your sense of who you are[iii]. This can be difficult even for planned pregnancies, but when the baby is unplanned then this shift in role may be something the couple doesn't want or feel ready for. Women may, for example, feel like becoming a mother will impact their chances at a career or get in the way of other life goals. You May Feel “Role Overload” The unexpected new role of being a parent can also lead to a feeling of "role overload" where the couple feel like they have too many roles to cope with, leading to stress and unhappiness. It’s like you’re juggling all these responsibilities- parent, spouse, bread-winner and so on- and it becomes nearly impossible to balance them all.
A research study from 2009[iv] found that this feeling of role overload mediated the link between unplanned pregnancy and satisfaction with being a parent. So preventing role overload by sharing out the different tasks, or by dropping some of your less important roles for a time, can improve couple's satisfaction with their new role.
Preparing for Your New Role
If it is the “role overload” that you are particularly feeling, our bonus guide will help step you through all that so that you can begin to break it down into manageable chunks and figure out what will or will not work. It just helps you take the overwhelm and tackle it as a couple. You can get this guide and worksheet by becoming a patron of The Marriage Podcast for Smart People.
Get the Guide! Preparation Helps Preparing yourself mentally and practically for the new parenting role is also essential. A study from 2017[v] found that taking women with unplanned pregnancies through a maternal role training program helped them to accept and find satisfaction in their new role. The program involves practical training on caring for the baby, breastfeeding, and looking after your own health during and after pregnancy.
So learning the skills helps, but there’s an emotional component to readiness too. This training program from the study also included asking the mothers to imagine and role play interacting with their new baby, to help them see themselves in the maternal role. Being able to envision themselves as mothers, as well as learning the practical skills to be good at it enabled these women to take satisfaction and find joy in their roles as mothers[vi]. Pay Attention to Finances Work and Finances Unplanned pregnancy can put a strain on finances, due to the mother often needing to quit her job or work less hours. Additional costs around caring for the baby and possibly even needing to move house to accommodate the newborn are also po...
Today we’re going to be looking at relational obsessive-compulsive disorder — a condition that I was only made aware of in the last year first through a friend. Relational Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a sub-type of OCD in which a person experiences “obsessive preoccupation, doubt and compulsive behaviors focused on one’s romantic partner[i]”. People with this condition report uncontrollable thoughts or obsessions about their relationship to their romantic partner and this can be very distressing and draining.
What Is ROCD? ROCD or Relational Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a condition where you have repeated uncontrollable thoughts or obsessions either about your relationship with your spouse (or fiancee or boy/girlfriend) or else you have those thoughts about the partner themselves. Because of these thoughts, there are also certain actions or compulsions that arise in order to try to satisfy or calm those obsessive thoughts.
Any time you have OCD in any form, the O is the obsession. That’s the uncontrollable thought. And the C is the compulsion, which is the nearly involuntary behavior to try to satisfy the thought.
The classic example for OCD is hand washing. So the obsession is with germs or cleanliness and the compulsion is to try to keep washing them to satisfy the thought.
When it comes to ROCD, there are two main types[ii]:
Relationship-centered: obsessive doubts about whether the relationship is working, whether your spouse really loves you and fears about being with the wrong person. This could occur with a fiancée or boy/girlfriend but we’ll just talk about spouses from now on. Partner centered: obsessive thoughts about possible flaws in your spouse, or constantly comparing your spouse to others (often with regards to flaws)
So those are the obsessions. The compulsive behaviors that follow are actions a person feels they need to take in order to reduce the anxiety caused by the obsessive thought. Often the behaviors may be mental acts like checking or reviewing in your mind whether you really do feel in love with your spouse. Maybe you’ll list their good qualities or make yourself remember positive experiences or you may perseverate over their flaws. You may also compulsively read marriage books or listen to marriage podcasts (cough). There can also be verbal compulsivity where you talk extensively to others about your spouse in order to attempt to soothe the obsessive thoughts or even constantly reviewing the pros and cons of your relationship with your spouse or else constantly asking your spouse if s/he loves you. How Does ROCD Form? ROCD often forms when a person is considering a major relationship commitment, such as getting married or having their first child. When most people experience doubt around these kinds of major commitments, they are able to deal with the doubts and anxieties fairly quickly and without undue distress.
But some people end up over-estimating how important and significant these doubts are. They assign tremendous value to them. People in this situation believe that their doubts and worries are highly significant, and so feel the need to deal with them using compulsive actions (such as mental checking, reassurance seeking and so on).
A mental link (or, neural pathway) therefore forms between the obsessive thought and the need to perform the compulsive action (e.g., when someone worries if their spouse is right for them, they feel the need to mentally compare their spouse to other men/women or seek the opinion of others). The more a person uses the compulsive action in response to the obsessive thought, the stronger the neural pathway becomes and the harder to get off it.
So why can some people deal with these doubts easily while others fall into ROCD? Well a research study done in 2013[iii] identified several predisposing factors which make a person more likely to enter this cycle include:
Perfectionism: the belief that your relationship or your spouse n...
When I work with married guys who want to break their porn habit they generally fall into one of two categories. Either their wife already knows or else she has no idea at all. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a husband whose wife knows but doesn’t care if he stops or not. In any case, if you’re in that latter category and you know you need to disclose this problem to your wife then today’s episode is for you.
Let me just say right off the bat that over the last 10 years the number of women using porn has drastically increased. So we could have just as easily titled this “How and When to Tell Your Husband About Your Porn Addiction” but it is still the case that the majority of users are male. And probably an even greater majority of undisclosed users are male. So please pardon on the male references. Much of what we have to say today would apply just as well to a wife disclosing to her husband for the first time. Should I Tell My Wife? The short answer is: yes!
In our broader culture over the past decades porn was viewed as something normal and harmless. I think some folks still holds this view but in recent years the research has consistently shown that porn use has a wide range of adverse effects on marriage, on the people using the porn, and the people who are in the porn industry. Not all - but many of the actors and actresses are victims of human trafficking and have other very challenging issues they are facing on a daily basis.
We talked more extensively about how porn impacts marriage in a past article/episode but just to recap and summarize, porn use results in:
Reduced marital satisfaction Reduced commitment, possibly leading to increased risk of infidelity Reduced sexual satisfaction Reduced intimacy
On top of that, the consequences of keeping the addiction a secret can be just as damaging as the addiction itself. Keeping parts of your life hidden from your spouse, the shame that surrounds the secret, and the fear of being discovered, all erode at the trust and intimacy between a couple. A research study from 2009[i] found that this secrecy creates a "crack" in the marriage bond, which is then likely to widen as the husband's shame and fear cause him to emotionally withdraw. So leaving the issue a secret can have harmful consequences.
Finally, telling your spouse is an essential first step in change. Keeping it a secret promotes the cycle of shame[ii], where shame and negative feelings compel you to want to use porn to feel better, which creates further shame. This cycle gets harder and harder to break out of unless you tell someone about it and admit to needing help. Can I Just Tell Someone Else? That’s a valid question: you understand that this disclosure is going to hurt her the most. I do think you need to bring one or two same-sex friends into your confidence and learn to be open and honest with them.
But at the same time, it is your wife who has been betrayed by your actions. She has the right to know that the most important person in her life has betrayed her. We had this discussion recently among our counseling team. Is there ever a situation where it makes sense not to disclose? One possible situation is if either of you is on your death bed. Not only is there the shattering impact of loss right in front of you, but also the loss of who your spouse thought you were. That creates some profoundly complex grief to sort through and may just not be fair in a situation like that or if you are in the middle of some other major crisis. Timing may be an issue.
But the fundamental components of having a happy marriage are things like commitment, loyalty, and trust. You cannot keep a pornography addiction secret and hope to simultaneously excel at those three things. Not only that but keeping the pornography use secret — even if she never asks about it — is an act of dishonesty. It is my belief that dishonesty is morally wrong. In our Christian faith,
The Adverse Childhood Experiences study was a huge research study conducted in the USA that has traced the impact of very difficult childhood experiences into adulthood. For those who have faced these challenges, we want to explore what the potential impacts are in marriage and how to best respond so that you can create or keep a happy, content marriage.
Adverse Childhood Experiences The ACE study wanted to explore the effects of childhood abuse and neglect on later life. It included over 17000 participants and further follow up studies continue to add to the original findings[i].
The study looked at ten different forms of adverse childhood experience (ACE), split into three categories:
Abuse Neglect Household challenges
Under abuse they looked at emotions, physical and/or sexual abuse. Under neglect they looked for emotional and/or physical neglect. And there were five household challenges:
Mother treated violently Substance abuse in the household Mental illness in the household Parental separation or divorce Household member incarcerated
Initial Findings Almost two thirds of the surveyed adults reported at least one ACE, and more than one in five reported three or more ACEs. ACEs are also often experienced together- if you experience one of the ten factors you are much more likely to have experienced at least one more[ii].
So how do these early experiences impact the rest of your life? ACEs are found to lead to a huge range of negative outcomes in adult life including damage to physical and mental health, dangerous or unhealthy lifestyle choices, and reduced life potential.
Now we need to unpack the impact of ACEs a little more but I want to pause to make a point first. Our goal here is not to point out damaged goods or to make anyone feel like they are somehow permanently emotionally crippled or, in the context of our marriage podcast, that they will make a terrible spouse. Not at all. There are as many wonderful people with ACEs as there are without. However, by acknowledging the potential impact of ACEs, at least now a couple knows how and why some of the current challenges may have developed and they can create some specific and targeted goals for healing.
Allow me to illustrate from the physical realm. Imagine I had a set of challenging and unexplainable physical health problems. After a lot of struggle and problems and doctoring it came out that I had been drinking from a polluted water source. Now I know that I need to stop drinking that water and also find out what was in the water. Once I know that I need to understand what the pollutants were and how they have impacted my health. And then I can take steps towards dealing with those symptoms in order to restore my health.
Same with ACEs. Once I understand that my present struggles are tied to my childhood experiences, I can begin to face those things in order to pursue healing. The ACE Pyramid One of the things the researchers discovered is that there were a potential set of negative changes that built one upon another. They charted this out as a pyramid because you have many people at the bottom and few at the top. In other words, the further up the pyramid you go the less likely you are to be affected unless you’ve had very severe ACEs.
The base level of the pyramid is the adverse childhood experiences themselves.
The next level up is disrupted development. So children with ACEs experience poor physical and mental development due to abuse, trauma or neglect.
The next level from there is social, emotional and cognitive impairment. Some of those children as adults will manifest poor coping skills, attachment disorders, mental illness, and cognitive impairment.
Next, some of them will go on to adopt health-risk behaviors. Risky behaviors such as smoking, alcohol use or promiscuity. Often adopted as coping mechanisms to help them survive the difficult circumstances they find themselves in.
In the US, living with extended family is increasing. 31% of children in the US now live with at least one additional adult in the house, as well as their parents- normally a family member. 10% live with one or both grandparents in the house[i].
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits and challenges this brings to marriage and how to make the most of it if you do have family living with you.
Living with extended family is becoming more common in the USA, probably in Canada as well, but in other cultures this has been the norm for a long time.
Families from China, India, and most of southern Europe frequently live in multi-generational households[ii]. Families from these cultures living in America are also more likely to have more of the extended family living in the home with them.
Additionally, economically disadvantaged families are more likely to live in extended family households: for example if a young couple can't afford their own house they may remain with parents. Just remember that sometimes “economically disadvantaged” in this context can also mean people who are doing just fine financially but they live in very, very expensive cities.
So what are the upsides and downsides of living with family or having family live with you? Financial Benefits or Consequences of Living With Family The issue typically is based on practical matters. Living with extended family can have either positive or negative consequences for the amount of resources available to the couple. On the one hand, couples can benefit from having extra income coming into the house from other people's jobs or pensions, which can reduce financial strain and increase quality of life.
A research study from 2011[iii] found that having extended families living together can help couples better manage financial difficulties, especially in more economically deprived families. Having grandparents or other family members around can also provide other resources such as childcare, practical help around the house and emotional support. Many couples living with their parents find that having mum and dad at home with them can be a real help during times of crisis or instability
On the flip side, it is equally possible for extended family to be a drain on the couple's resources under different circumstances. Having extra adults in the house who aren't contributing to the household income can increase financial strain. Equally, having to care for elderly parents or having to live with siblings or other family members who you don't get along with can be emotionally draining. Under these circumstances, marital happiness is likely to suffer.
Another potential impact of the financial side is if you as a couple are depending on the financial resources of others you may end up with less independence as a result. For example, if you are relying on financial help from your parents, your parents may expect to have a say in how the house is run or even on where you spend money on renovations or decorations. This can lead to frustration and conflict[iv]. Relational Impact of Family in the Home What about relational impact?
Just like with the financial situation, extended families living together can either be good or bad for the bonds between you all. Many couples find that having parents or other family members with them can strengthen the bond they have with them: they are able to see them more often and connect on a more meaningful level through seeing themselves as part of the same family unit[v].
In our episode on child-centered marriage and why it’s bad we saw how a family is like a system where one good relationship has positive effects on all the others. This means that having good relationships with the others in the house naturally makes the marriage bond stronger. But the reverse can also be true. Having to share the same space and having to share practical tasks (housework, caring for elderly parents/young children) can create tension and conflict,
Discovering that your spouse has had an affair or has in some way been sexually unfaithful is often an extremely traumatic event. You’ll feel like the boundaries of your marriage have been violated, your trust in your spouse has been destroyed, and even your own identity has been shaken. Betrayal As Trauma The first thing we want to do is just confirm that a betrayal can represent trauma.
Trauma has been happening since the dawn of time, but as a psychological concept, I think the Vietnam war really put it on the map as veterans came back and many of them with the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And for a long time trauma was considered something that happened mainly to war veterans, often police officers and other first responders.
Not to make light of any of what those men and women go through in service for our freedom and safety, but we have also come to realize that trauma is actually an even more widespread experience.
Think, for example, of the core elements of trauma from war: near-death experiences (or having witnessed others die suddenly), feelings of overwhelm and helplessness, or when too much happens too fast and too soon.
Well, in a relational context if you consider your marriage a safe zone — and you should, if your marriage is healthy — and then all of a sudden you find out that what you thought was safe is actually very unsafe and threatening through the disclosure of an affair, as an example, then you have trauma. You have too much happening too fast and too soon. Your world implodes, you may even feel that your safety is incredibly threatened — do I have an STD now? There is often overwhelm as your world crumbles and a feeling of helplessness because you cannot undo what has already happened.
The disclosure of betrayal then quickly shakes the foundation of your life and marriage, leading to symptoms of trauma similar to what veterans experience[i]. Betrayal Trauma Symptoms and Effects Viewing betrayal as a trauma event can prepare you to make sense of the effects. It helps you understand what you are feeling and why. So let’s look at four of the major feelings and effects. Grief The betrayed spouse can feel an intense sense of loss following an affair. They feel that their marriage and their life as it was is now gone, and go through a grieving process. These spouses may also feel a loss of innocence, loss of safety, loss of purpose and loss of self-respect following an affair[ii]. Confusion The betrayed spouse has to deal with the "unnerving experience of feeling as though one has not the foggiest idea who this person is to whom one had pledged oneself in a committed relationship[iii]". Since marriage is such a core part of a person's identity, they may also be so shaken that they start to be unsure who they really are. This can lead to a state of emotional turmoil due to the rapid experience of all kinds of emotions (anger, sadness, hopelessness, fear, vulnerability etc) Reactivity Going through traumatic events such as betrayal often leads to high levels of emotional reactivity[iv]. Individuals who have gone through trauma often react very strongly to any trigger or situation that reminds them of the trauma. They can also have trouble regulating their emotions generally, leading to emotional outbursts, mood-swings or over-reactions to minor problems[v].
This is not meant as criticism but just to normalize that these kinds of behaviors are really just cascading effects of having gone through the profoundly difficult experience of betrayal trauma. Trust Betrayal can destroy all sense of trust between spouses so that trusting each other on little things becomes difficult. This means that conflict over little things is also much more likely, as the betrayed spouse can no longer trust that their husband/wife is being honest and has their best interests at heart[vi]. Often the lies and secrecy that surround an affair can be just as damaging as the act itself (if not more so),
Sometimes sexual guilt can be a real drag — acting like a wet blanket not only on your sex life with your spouse but also even dampening the joy you find in your marriage. And most Christian couples don’t feel like they can just throw off their moral boundaries in order to bypass the guilt. So it’s easy to get stuck. Today we want to help you get unstuck.
Sexual History and Guilt If you feel that in some way, at some time, you have violated “proper” sexual conduct then you are likely experiencing sexual guilt[i]. Actually, sex guilt is not unique to Christians or even religious people, but there is indeed a link between strong religious views and feelings of sex guilt.
Causes of sex guilt for Christians include:
Premarital sex: either with the person you are now married to or with past partners Sexual activity other than sex that you consider “going too far”: again, either with your spouse or with previous partners Affairs Beliefs: there are some very strict or conservative Christians who develop some belief that sex is sinful in itself and so feel guilty about having sex or feel guilty about their sexual desire.
It turns out that guilt around these issues, especially premarital sex, is a lot more common than you may expect. In one study of churchgoing young adults, 70% reported having had premarital sex. Within that group, 80% regretted and felt guilty about their sexual history[ii]. A Couple Caveats We’re not here today to help you feel good about what you have done when those actions have gone against your own moral boundaries. We would like you to know and experience forgiveness and peace and to have relief from guilt — but that comes from God, not from us.
We also feel that that the best sex happens within moral boundaries as outlined in the Bible — and in other episodes, we have shared the research that backs this up with hard evidence.
And the last caveat is that we also want all of our listeners to know — in keeping with what we’ve just said — that it is possible to have strong moral boundaries around sex and an extremely satisfying sex life. It is not mandatory if you are Biblically conservative to also be sexually repressed. Shame vs. Guilt Let’s take a moment to differentiate between the feelings of shame and guilt.
Guilt is the belief that you have done something bad, or committed a sinful act. The negative feelings it creates are specifically tied to the action or behavior. In some ways, guilt can actually be useful since it draws your attention to something you have done wrong and motivates you to try and fix it (or at least not do it again). Being prone to feeling guilt is linked to acting in a good and moral way[iii]. For the most part, guilt is a useful, healthy, adaptive emotion.
Shame, on the other hand, is more all-encompassing. Shame is the belief that you yourself are sinful, or that you are a bad person[iv]. Research from 2007[v] defines guilt as "our conscience telling us we have done something wrong. If we go through the process of rectifying the wrong, then we feel better and our guilt is relieved. With shame, on the other hand, our whole being is at fault. Shame makes us feel condemned to our very core." Unlike guilt, shame does not motivate people to try and right their wrongs or to act in a morally good way. Instead, it can create withdrawal and a sense of hopelessness, as the person believes they are permanently tarnished or damaged.
I often say that guilt says “I did something bad” and shame says “I am a bad person”. Guilt is about behavior. Shame is about identity.
Sex can lead to guilt when you believe you have done something wrong: for example, premarital sex. But it can also lead to shame because people who have lost their virginity often feel like their "purity" or their whole worth as a husband/wife is permanently gone. Since it affects your entire view of who you are, shame is much harder to get rid of, and more psychologically harmful than guilt[vi].
So the transition from just the two of you into a family is a big one! I know when we were wondering about starting a family it was really challenging to try to think through all the things one should be aware of. Well, we want to take away some of the mystery today and help you make an informed, prepared decision so that you can move into this new phase of marriage with greater confidence and awareness of what lays ahead.
It’s Common Not to Feel Ready Actually, less than half (44%) of couples expecting their first child feel ready for becoming a parent. And then once the child is born, the number who feel totally prepared and confident drops to 18%[i]. Meaning that lots of the couples were wrong when they thought they were ready!
To me, this is kind of like me getting on a roller coaster. I feel a lot of uncertainty and then as we go up the hill of pregnancy it gets scarier and scarier and then you have the baby and it’s like, “Woah, this is way scarier than I thought!” But that’s just me — I wasn’t a huge baby or kid person before we got married and so really felt like I was figuring that whole thing out from scratch.
I think it’s good to mention this just so that we normalize the fact that most of us feel unprepared but we still end up doing just fine. Maybe there are others listening today and they feel ready and that’s great too. So we are not here to scare anyone off but just to come alongside you and say that it’s normal to have some butterflies and encourage you through this part of your journey.
There are a number of things to consider and I think it’s important to talk through these with your spouse and just connect at that deeper level as you talk about your fears, uncertainties, and doubts. That will strengthen your bond as you come to this new phase of life. Common Challenges When Becoming a Parent
No doubt about it: having kids is tough. Almost all couples with newborn babies experience challenges such as[ii]:
Sleep deprivation Dealing with the child's feeding, crying and sleeping difficulties Reduced time for yourself and for other responsibilities Reduced ability to leave the house and see other people (especially for the mother) Financial costs around new clothes, feeding, setting up the baby's room, etc.
Additionally, a significant minority of parents (20%) have to deal with more severe sleep or feeding difficulties which can put even more strain on them. In some parents, this leads to high levels of stress and reduced mental health. Around 22% of new parents show some symptoms of depression and 15% show symptoms of anxiety[iii]. Again, we’re not trying to worry you here. Just be aware that if you’re finding the transition to parenthood difficult, you definitely aren’t alone. How Babies Impact Life and Marital Satisfaction So let’s look at how parenthood impacts your marriage and your life overall. Research typically finds that day to day life satisfaction is reduced in the first years of parenting, due to having more demands, less free time, etc[iv]. Marital satisfaction can also decrease, due to having less time together, higher stress levels, and reduced sex[v]. So there is a real impact on marriage and we unpacked this in more detail back in episode 51.
However, don’t let this discourage you from moving forward with starting a family! Overall life-satisfaction is almost always increased by becoming a parent: the pleasure and meaning you take from raising kids increases your satisfaction, sense of purpose and feeling of unity with your spouse.
So new parents should expect a short-term drop in their day-to-day quality of life/marriage. But the long-term rewards of becoming a parent normally outweigh the difficulties[vi]. Are You Ready for a Role Change? Part of transitioning into parenthood then becomes about making sure you are mentally prepared for changes in your roles in life. Where in the past you may have been able to pay a lot of attention to being a career man or woman,
You have just discovered your husband's pornography addiction or the other woman. Your safe world or life as you know it has shattered/come crashing down. We want to provide you with some essential truths and tips/strategies for coping with this sudden devastation and also talk about what you can expect of yourself in the moments and days immediately following betrayal.
Today I’m happy to introduce you to Sharon Snooks. Sharon is an Associate Therapist here at OnlyYouForever. She is a Registered Social Service Worker in Ontario Canada and Sharon has a real passion for working with clients who are recovering from trauma.
Of course, betrayal is one form of trauma and so I will often refer betrayed wives to Sharon and her work with them has been very much appreciated. So today Sharon is going to sharing five things betrayed wives need to know when they are confronted with the very real, very raw emotions and the profound impact of betrayal.
Let’s jump in here by just setting the stage a little. We’re speaking mainly to wives, although some of this could be translated to betrayed husbands too, and to wives who really have just discovered their husband’s betrayal and are staggering under the shock and really feeling like their world has been shattered. Maybe just give us a quick overview of what you’re going to cover and then let’s dive in!
We’re going to look at what you can expect from yourself in the immediate aftermath of this discovery, what is normal including betrayal trauma reactions and first steps in your healing journey including creating safety - a safe place and setting boundaries and basic self-care.
Betrayal is a deeply traumatic experience: your life is going along as normal and then suddenly there’s a big discovery which changes everything. This discovery becomes a turning point: you think about your life before the event, and how things are different afterward. With infidelity, your view of your life, and of who your husband is has to totally change. This change becomes a real threat to your sense of safety and you begin to feel a sense of hopelessness.
My first message to the betrayed wife - it is not your fault! You could not have prevented this - husband is responsible for his behavior. It’s normal to feel dumb - how could I have missed this? Some wives even start to feel like they’re going crazy due to the overwhelming shock of the discovery. On top of that many people will start to look back on their life in the run-up to the discovery, and interpret things through this new filter of “my husband betrayed me”, which totally changes how they see things. You start to question everything you thought you knew about your life.
It’s normal to trust your spouse. It isn’t normal, in a healthy marriage, to scrutinize everything your spouse does as if they might have an affair. So the way you acted up until the discovery was perfectly normal. You were living a normal life, and are now in abnormal circumstances. You couldn’t have seen it coming.
Another thing it’s really helpful to look at is betrayal trauma symptoms. Knowing what these are, and what to expect, can help validate this experience. Trauma has physical, emotional, behavioral, and even spiritual effects. Physically it can stop you sleeping, and create feelings of nausea. Emotionally, it can either create extreme feelings of anger or lead to a sense of numbness where you don’t really feel anything. Grief is also a factor: wives grieve for the marriage and husband they thought they had. Worry is also a huge issue as now you start to wonder how your life is going to look now.
On the behavior side, many women withdraw from their social circle due to the embarrassment and shame around an affair. Mentally you often end up feeling flooded and drained, just being overloaded by every thought in your head. Spiritually, some wives struggle with feeling betrayed by God: if you believe you married the right person, who God wanted you to marry,
Today we’re exploring the intersection between theology and our sex lives as married couples. These may sound like very disparate topics, but in reality what you believe about God, and what you think the Bible says about sex, will have a big impact on how much - or how little - pleasure you get from God’s great gift of sexuality.
This particular episode was recorded when Verlynda was recovering from pneumonia, so it is a conversation between Caleb Simonyi-Gindele and Jesse Schellenberg. A summary of this conversation follows below.
So what do your beliefs about God and the Bible have to do with your sex life? Well, I think a lot of couples feel like the rug has been pulled from under their feet when it comes to sex: in today’s culture everything is permissible, everything has the green light. So how do we as Christian couples respond?
A lot of Christian couples may have questions about sex, and what is and isn’t permissible: are sex toys ok? Is anal sex ok? And the general answer is that it really depends on how you feel about these things in light of what the Bible teaches generally about sexuality. The Bible does give some clear guidelines: is what you’re doing respectful? Is it honouring? Is it mutually enjoyable and physically safe? These principles will guide you towards what is healthy and helpful for your marriage and what is not.. Talk About Sexuality At Church Overall, the Church hasn’t done a great job teaching about Christian sexuality. For the most part it has not given people a healthy sense of sexuality. Sex is a fundamental, biological gift from God, and yet we never seem to talk about it in Church. On rare occasions, we do teach about sex, the lessons we get usually only amount to 1) don’t be gay, and 2) sex is bad if you do it before you’re married. That’s all we get. And then on your wedding night, you’re expected to just flip this switch and suddenly transform into a healthy sexual being after having denied your sexual feelings for decades. That sometimes doesn’t work so well!
So I think it’s important to start creating a more healthy dialogue about sex within the Church. We just need to start talking about it! And then we need to start referring back to the actual biblical principles about sex. Talk About Sexuality At Home Sometimes people are uncomfortable talking about these issues, and their objection often boils down to “I’ll have to talk about sex with my kids”. But that’s good! Have those conversations: talk to your children about this fundamental part of being human: sex. Of course, filter it to the age and understanding of your children, but these discussions should be a normal and healthy thing. Kids are smarter and more aware than you think!
What about between yourselves as a couple? Many couples find it hard to talk to each other about these issues. How can we deal with that? First, we need to attack the idea that talking about sex is dirty or taboo. This mentality is unbiblical and creates a culture of shame. We need to orient ourselves around what God says about sexuality. God could have had us make babies any way he wanted. And he chose this way and declared that it was good. And if God says that sex is good, who are we to go against that?
Our first commandment was to be fruitful and multiply. A sexual commandment. We’re made in God’s image. So that’s a rousing endorsement that sex is good! So if you want to have better sex, talk to your partner and don’t feel ashamed to do so.
Maybe you understand that, but still find it hard to talk about sex with your spouse. If that’s the case, instead maybe start by talking to your spouse about those feelings of shame around sex. Your spouse has already probably picked up on it and may have some of the same feelings. So start by talking about that issue and go from there. Sometimes “talking about talking about” something can be a good way in.
It’s also really important to create a healthy lifestyle around sex.
Today we revisit the topic of creating more intimacy in your marriage. This is actually a replay of episode 108. We don’t normally do replays but Verlynda is in the hospital with pneumonia today. I am glad to say that she is recovering, but, boy does that pneumonia ever hit hard. So, please keep her in your thoughts and enjoy this show from a couple years ago.
If you really want to build more intimacy in your marriage – and who wouldn’t??? – here are four ways to do that. Take the time to hear, and digest this.
1st Way to Build Intimacy: Intimacy is Built Through Disclosure and Responsiveness Given that intimacy itself is purely emotional, let’s put a nice, sterile definition on it…
Intimacy is what happens through interactions of self-disclosure and partner responsiveness to disclosure. This process is believed to develop feelings of closeness between the speaker and the listener.[i]
Gotta love it!
Perhaps the definition that Caleb uses will be easier to understand. He says that intimacy is really like “Into Me See”. When I let you see into me and you respond appropriately, and when that is reciprocated, you get intimacy – That’s what deepens love.
So, the first way that you can increase the level of intimacy in your relationship is through disclosure and responsiveness, or doing the “into me see” thing.
Husbands, Caleb has some words of wisdom for you. When you let your wife see your emotions, that creates far more intimacy than when you let your wife just see facts and information about you.[ii]
It’s cute and fun and worthwhile for you to share that you got a bike for your sixth birthday. However, when you tell her how you felt after you fell off your new bike and your dad got all mad at you for scratching it, that will create greater intimacy than just telling her you got a bike.
Again, when you complain about the guys at work, that’s fine. You need to share. When you tell her you’re afraid of losing your job though, and that you’re carrying this fear around like a dark cloud in your heart, that will create intimacy far deeper than the facts regarding your work situation.
Wives, the same deal goes for you. You need to be connecting emotionally with your husband. Intimacy is built up when I let you see into my emotional world. That’s very vulnerable.
The flip side of this is that when your spouse shares an intimate detail with you: you have to respond. You must, must, MUST acknowledge it. Even if all you can think of is “Wow, I never knew that”, then just say, “Wow, I never knew that”; or “Thank you for sharing that with me – that’s really special.”
Something, please! It’s not just enough to share: responsiveness needs to happen too. 2nd Way To Build Intimacy: Intimacy is Built Through Knowledge and Understanding There is a great study from 1998 which is worth mentioning, even though a lot of couples have already figured this out.
First, couples who are better at predicting each other reported greater feelings of marital intimacy.[iii] That’s just saying that couples feel more intimate if they know each other well.
Become a student of your spouse! Intimacy in marriage comes from knowing and understanding each other.
There is a positive cycle that happens here. When you accurately understand and know a person, that will lead to greater trust. You trust the people you know best (assuming that the knowledge is positive…).
When you have that greater degree of trust, you feel safe to be more expressive of your inner world of emotions and thoughts. In other words, you become more vulnerable and you’re more willing to self-disclose. Then what? That leads to more knowledge and understanding between the two of you, and more predictability and then there is more trust.
And what happens when there is more trust? Intimacy!
It’s a brilliant positive cycle. This is why marriage should keep getting better and better.
So, you can build intimacy by increasing your knowledge and understanding of each other,
Every marriage has conflict. As we often point out, it is not so much how often you fight, but rather what you do when you fight and afterward. Do you repair after conflict? Do you work together during conflict to get to the bottom of issues? Today we have 10 Rules to help you fight fairly.
Fair Fighting Since we have so much emotionally and relationally at stake in a marriage, I think it is easy to forget that we need to be decent towards each other when we fight.
In the Bible, Proverbs 18:19 says "A brother offended is more unyielding than a strong city…” and this could as easily apply to a wife or husband. As soon as you actually offend your spouse it really entrenches them into their position. We think that if we use stronger words or language they are more likely to capitulate. That doesn’t work.
As always, when coming to this topic Verlynda and I didn’t sit down and just pick 10 things out of the air. No, we asked our researcher to go into the marriage research journals and see what he could find.
He came up with three studies from 1989 to 2016[i] in which married couples were asked to list rules they thought were important dating with conflict. Hundreds of rules were reported and these were then grouped into common themes by the researchers. From these themes, we developed these 10 rules for fair fighting.
When followed by both spouses, all 10 rules will help you resolve conflict between you more easily and will improve your marital satisfaction. They are not in any particular order: you will probably notice that you as a couple already do some of these, but you may hear some that you haven’t tried or don’t use often enough. Rule #1: Be Respectful This one is fairly self-explanatory: show respect and love for your spouse even when you disagree. But think about how you do that:
Don't be rude Avoid name calling Try to keep calm Don't escalate things when you feel threatened
Being deliberately hurtful or aggressive makes conflict much worse and creates a like-for-like cycle where both of you just try to retaliate when your spouse upsets you[ii]. Being calm and respectful allows you to resolve the conflict quickly, without it damaging your bond of intimacy.
This theme of being considerate of your spouse, even during conflict, was by far the most important rule found in the research, accounting for 26% of the total variance in whether conflict resolution was successful or not[iii].
It is probably worth asking your wife or husband: is there anything I can do to be more respectful of you when we’re in conflict? Rule #2: Say What You Are Upset About (Concisely) Be direct in stating what you are upset about, and why[iv]. Vague hints, passive aggressive comments and saying "I'm mad at you" without explaining why do not lead to effective conflict resolution.
State what the issue is plainly and concisely, eg "when you do X I feel Y". Many of the couples in the studies thought that being concise and getting to the point was a very important part of conflict resolution[v]. Doing so allows you to get the issue resolved first time, rather than leaving things unresolved and creating resentment. Knowing what you are upset about and expressing that will help you to get to the bottom of things. Rule #3: No Ultimatums This is about times when one spouse tries to force another to do what they want, eg "If you don't do X, then I'll Y". But it can also be when one spouse forces the other to deal with an issue totally on their own terms, eg "You have until tonight to deal with X or I'll be really mad" or "I don't care if you're tired from work—we have to deal with this NOW".
Threats and ultimatums are unfair- they place too much focus on your own needs, while making your spouse feel cornered and forced into doing what you want (rather than actually agreeing with you)[vi]. This kind of behavior destroys trust and intimacy and creates a lot of resentment.
Instead, aim to express your concerns in a way that is firm bu...
According to one source, 75% of men ejaculate within two minutes of penetration. At the request of one of our patrons, we went into the research literature to see if this time period could be extended. Not surprisingly, 88% of men have some concern over ejaculating too quickly and almost all men (99% in one study) use some kind of strategy to delay ejaculation. So if it’s something that basically all men worry about, is there anything that can reliably help?
A Quick Primer on Ejaculatory Control In case you were wondering, ejaculatory control is the ability to control when you orgasm (for men). There’s also the term ejaculatory latency which is the time between penetration and ejaculation.
Perhaps the best-known term is premature ejaculation. It is not always a clearly defined term but it indicates that ejaculation is either happening too soon or sooner than you want it too, or in a way that affects the quality of sex for you and your wife[i].
So by one definition, premature ejaculation is only a problem if you and/or your wife feel like it’s affecting your sex life. Well 88% of men report some concern over ejaculating too quickly, so we want to look at some strategies to use in this regard. There are a lot of different ideas floating around about what works and what doesn’t, some of which get pretty strange. So let’s try to sift through all the rumors and heresy to try and figure out what the research says actually works. Strategies to Use Let me say a couple things before we jump in here. First, this is a complex issue. So maybe think of today’s episode as a primer and know that sex therapy really is a specialty in the counseling field. Remember that we are really working on ejaculatory control today and not so much on premature ejaculation itself. There are books and resources and therapists who can really dig into that issue with you: we are more aiming at husbands who are doing OK during sex but feel that they could improve the sexual satisfaction in their marriage if they had more ejaculatory control.
Second, stay with me to the end because we’re going to go a couple layers deeper on everything at the end.
Third, while some of these strategies seem pretty simple, this can actually be a really complex issue.
OK let’s get into some of these. More Sex A research study back in 1984[ii] found that there is a link between long periods of abstinence from sex and a lower ejaculatory latency. Longer periods without sex cause men to ejaculate at lower levels of arousal. So more regular sex can help with the ability to control or delay ejaculation.
This is where it gets complex right off the bat because if you haven’t been having great sex due to this issue, your wife probably doesn’t want more of the same sex. So while we titled this “A Husband’s Guide” this is where it becomes apparent that a problem like this is best faced as a couple to talk through what is going on and find a way forward. Medication for Ejaculatory Control Various medications exist to enhance ejaculatory control, such as the pill vardenafil and the spray PSD502, both of which have research demonstrating that they increase ejaculatory latency and overall sexual satisfaction[iii]. Use of these medications can also increase confidence and reduce anxiety about performance, which is often just as important. Apparently, they do sometimes come with some minor side effects such as headaches or indigestion.
So if it’s really affecting you, going to a doctor and getting something prescribed could be a quick fix. Distracting Thoughts Perhaps on the more humorous— or disturbing — end of the spectrum are the use of distracting thoughts.
A study in 1997[iv] studied ways men try to delay ejaculation during sex. 74% of men in the study utilized distracting thoughts to delay ejaculation. 65% of these were "sex neutral" thoughts about things unrelated to sex such as work. One participant reported "singing the national anthem in his head" as a strategy.
The same old arguments … the same old cycle. In the marriage counseling world, we call these negative interaction cycles. The topic or concern or issue may change but it’s usually the same pattern: one spouse is more demanding or trying to get a response and the other avoids or dismisses or withdraws. And then it escalates from there. Today, we’re going to help you get started on breaking out of this pattern!
The Three Cycles There’s really just three kinds of cycles. The most common is where one spouse is pursuing or demanding or attacking; the other spouse is avoiding, dismissive or withdrawing. Sometimes called the attack-withdraw or demand-withdraw cycle. The second is where both spouses typically go on the attack. The third is where both spouses avoid. Let’s break these down a little bit. The Demand-Withdraw Cycle In this form, one spouse (classically the wife, although occasionally I see this in reverse) tries to engage in a discussion about an issue that is important to him or her. They will typically make demands or apply pressure. The automatic response of the other spouse is to avoid, dismiss or withdraw from the discussion[i].
This often leads to escalation, as the demanding spouse feels ignored or unheard and so has to resort to increasingly strong forms of attack in order to try to break through the defenses. Unfortunately, the withdrawing spouse, in the face of an intensified attack, will often double down on the defense and withdraw even more, often stonewalling the attacker.
This will continue until either the attacker gives up which is a profoundly lonely moment for him or her, or until the withdrawer explodes.
This style of conflict is not good for marital satisfaction (no surprise there). The Mutually-Hostile Approach In this approach, typically both spouses are pursuers or attackers. You respond to criticism with further criticism and with a conscious or subconscious agenda to provoke an angry response. As you might expect, this often escalates and usually just becomes an anger-venting, cathartic experience rather than one that actually solves problems and resolves conflict[ii].
While this may be a more frightening approach to conflict, and certainly doesn’t do much good for either of you, it is at least easier to break out of than the common demand-withdraw pattern. Simply because both spouses want to express themselves (which is helpful) and work on the issue at hand. It simply becomes a matter of figuring out a more productive way to do so[iii]. Avoid-Avoid The third pattern is where both spouses are avoiding or are naturally withdrawers. In this situation, there’s no major overt conflict and no screaming matches but typically nothing ever gets resolved. Unfortunately, this leads to a buildup of resentment as all these unresolved issues grow and grow[iv].
Now it is important to note that your style may change. For example, if you started out your marriage avoid-avoid you may eventually find one person transitions to pursuing. Or both of you get so frustrated that you become mutually hostile.
One shift I see more commonly is in the demand-withdraw cycle (the common one we began with), the pursuer gets burnt out. Then they often come in as an avoid-avoid situation in therapy and when we do our history and assessment work at the start I soon begin to see that it used to be demand-withdraw but then eventually the pursuing spouse got burnt out.
All of these cycles are more common in couples whose marriage is distressed: if things are going badly and there’s a lot of tension and unresolved anger then falling into a negative cycle is much easier. As you’d probably expect, each of these cycles creates further distress in the marriage[v].
Breaking the Pattern
If you want to drill down into some detailed tactics on breaking out of these patterns then our bonus guide for today’s episode will show you how to do that. You can get this by becoming a patron of The Marriage Podcast for Smart People.
There are a constellation of marriage-promoting behaviors packed into the Biblical instruction for husbands to honor their wives. Today, we’re launching from a simple phrase in the Bible that instructs husbands to show honor to their wives to demonstrate how a host of research-backed findings are encapsulated in this truth.
Our podcasts are not sermons — I am a professional marriage counselor, but in serving my church community and affiliation I do get involved in a fair bit of preaching. Today, we’re going to be looking at how one Bible verse — actually, just a phrase or part of one Bible verse — can be unpacked into a host of marriage-promoting behaviors.
It’s another example of how the Bible holds some practical, life-changing truth. In this case, the phrase is an instruction to husbands to give or “Show honor to your wife” and is found in 1 Peter 3:7. Respecting Your Wife Within marriage, honoring your wife is meant to be an unconditional act of showing value to her because of the place she has in your life. While respect is earned, honor is given. And in this case given because of her role, not because of what she does.
The challenge then is to give her honor even when it is difficult and even when you do not feel she deserves it. I am not asking you to accept your wife’s misbehavior or to condone or support things she may do that are hurtful or destructive, but part of how marriage is sustained through commitment and loyalty is by this principle of honor.
This means that even in difficult times and even with marriage difficulties that you interact with and treat your wife in a respectful, honorable way. Ways to Show Honor What does that look like? Let’s unpack this idea of showing respect a little more and look at how research supports this truth. Faithfulness Being faithful and loyal to your wife is an important part of honoring her. Obviously, this means not cheating on her: that would certainly not be honoring!
But there's much more to faithfulness than just avoiding infidelity[i]. Husbands also honor their wives by:
Avoiding "emotional affairs”: too much reliance on emotional intimacy with a woman other than your spouse[ii]. Not ogling other women: in real life, on TV, using porn etc. is likewise not honoring or being faithful to your wife, and will have very negative consequences for your marriage[iii].
Genuine faithfulness is about not placing anyone (or anything) else above your spouse (emotionally or sexually) and making sure your spouse gets "the best of you"[iv]. So one way to show honor is through faithfulness. Public and Private Praise Another way to show honor to your wife is through praising her: both praising her when you are alone and when you are in public. Private Praise is Honoring Giving praise and compliments to your wife, and expressing gratitude for what she does, are great ways to show honor. This should be a mix of specific compliments and recognition of what she does, and also praising and admiring who she is[v].
When giving praise, it is helpful to try to keep thinking of new things, rather than expressing the same things over and over, and express it in a way that is genuine rather than forced or rote[vi]. Expressions of gratitude and admiration are strongly linked to higher marital satisfaction, commitment, and overall happiness for both spouses[vii]. Public Praise is Honoring As Well Husbands should also talk about their wives to other people in a way that is honoring: both when the wife is present and when she is not. This not only is a blessing to your marriage and reinforces your positive perspective of your wife, but can also be helpful in preventing extra-marital affairs.
Praising your wife in this way includes things like[viii]:
Praising and speaking well of her to others Siding with her, not friends or family Siding with her in parenting issues, especially in front of the kids
It also means there are certain things you are going to take up in priv...
One of the concerns that often comes up in premarital counselling is from a couple where there are different amounts of sexual experience. Even apart from the moral concerns this may prompt are the fears, uncertainties, and doubts of what sexual intimacy may look like when you get married.
For those of you that are new to this podcast, Verlynda and I are born-again believers but I’d say we are the non-judging variety, and we come to marriage with the belief that it comes as a gift from God, but we also believe that marriage is for all people, not just for Christians. As such, our podcasts are not preachy and they are usually not even very pastoral. We take an integrated approach between our Christian worldview and current research to bring you the best truth and wisdom for your marriage.
But most of our readers are followers of Jesus Christ, and one of the Biblical values that we adhere to is that sex is reserved for marriage. The reason for that is not because God is prudish and likes to take pleasure away from people, but for a few reasons.
First, we believe that God gets to set the rules. Second, we believe that the best sex happens in the marriage bed. Or should…that may not be your experience, but the research has shown that happily married couples are indeed having the best sex: moreso than singles or cohabiting couples. Finally, while sex in any context may bring pleasure, we are going to see again today that the only place where loving, consensual sex is most likely to be free of complications is inside marriage.
So that’s just a little primer on where we are coming from on this episode. Let’s point out that if you’re virgins and not married, this is another reason why we recommend waiting for marriage. But if you’re coming to marriage and you’re not a virgin, we’re not here to shame you. There are likely to be some consequences but God is a God of redemption and grace. So we’re not here to shame or judge you, just to help you create a thriving passionate marriage. After all, none of us comes to marriage perfect. We all have brokenness.
Let’s begin by acknowledging some of the struggles that may come in a situation like this. How Premarital Sex Can Impact Marriage A quick touch of background theory: in social psychology exchange theory is a commonly used way of understanding how people act. And exchange theory views relationships in terms of give and take. The basic premise is that people are happiest when the reward they get from a relationship is higher than what they have to put into it (the cost).
When it comes to marriages, sexual satisfaction is determined by four factors:
Reward (pleasure, intimacy) Cost (having to do things you don't want, differences in sexual desire or preference) Comparison of rewards (how the rewards of the current relationship compare to past relationships- is sex with your spouse more or less satisfying?) Comparison of costs (how the costs of the marriage compare to past relationships)
Now, this is going to look a bit different depending on your past sexual experience, if any. For the virgin spouse there is no comparison to previous partners, so 3 and 4 don't apply: sexual satisfaction is totally determined by the current relationship. Anxiety about lack of sexual experience or about being compared to previous partners may contribute to the "costs" of the relationship for the virgin spouse and make sex less enjoyable initially.
For a non-virgin spouse, satisfaction will be partly determined by how the current sex compares to previous partners. This can go either way: if sex was high in reward with previous partners then current sexual satisfaction may suffer, but if prior sex was higher in cost than the current sex (e.g., past partners wanted to have sex in ways you didn't enjoy, or weren't good at responding to your needs) then sexual satisfaction in the marriage may be higher.
What we’re acknowledging here is that it is hard to get away from the ...
Infertility is the inability to conceive a child after at least 1 year of trying. Turns out about 10% of US couples experience infertility, and of those, about half will eventually conceive while the other half remain permanently infertile[i]. That’s actually a pretty high number: 1 in 10 couples struggle with this issue, 1 in 20 permanently face it.
Challenges of Infertility As anyone who is going through this themselves will know, infertility can be a hard thing to live with. I want to begin by normalizing some of the strain that infertility puts on marriages[ii]:
Meaning. Many couples see having children as a natural part of marriage, and being unexpectedly unable to do so affects their sense of meaning and purpose in life. Expectations. Similarly, much of society sees having children as the norm, so being unable may lead to disapproval from family and friends, and high levels of pressure to conceive. 83% of couples feel some form of pressure to conceive, most commonly from their spouse or parents, or from friends and other family members. Blame and guilt. The spouse who is experiencing the infertility problems may feel high levels of guilt and shame at the distress they are causing to their spouse Physical. Taking treatment for infertility can be physically demanding and can also lead to sexual performance problems. Financial. Seeking help from doctors can take up a lot of time and also cost a lot.
These are real issues. But as far as your marriage goes, it is how you deal with these challenges that determines whether or not infertility will affect your marriage, and the quality of your life overall.
Research shows that infertility can negatively impact marriage, but can also bring unexpected positives. 25% of women and 21% of men reported that their marriage had become stronger and they had been drawn closer together as a result of the infertility, and over half of couples can identify at least some benefits to their marriage as a result[iii].
This is the kind of thing that really gets me excited about marriage because here’s pretty much a major life blow and yet it’s in the context of a loving marriage that it can be reframed into some positives.
We are going to talk about how to be sure that it turns out to be a positive in your marriage, despite the grief and loss associated with it. However, let’s talk about a couple of the negative consequences first just so we’re aware of some potential pitfalls. Possible Negative Consequences of Infertility Primarily we need to pay attention to the impact on marital and/or sexual satisfaction. Marital Satisfaction and Infertility Infertility sometimes has a negative impact on marital quality. This effect is strongest for women but can also impact men[iv]. Stress caused by infertility can increase marital conflict, reduce self-esteem, and reduce overall happiness and quality of life.
Why is this negative effect stronger for women? A study in 1992[v] looked into this and found that for men, the stress of infertility was no different to other forms of marital stress and conflict. But for women, infertility created a different kind of stress that was more rooted in the woman's sense of identity and self-efficacy. Often women have a stronger desire to have children than their husbands, and hold motherhood as a strong part of their identity. So for men, infertility can be a stress that creates conflict and other burdens, but it often impacts women on a deeper level.
Researchers also note that stress and marital discord become more likely the longer the infertility problems go on[vi], which is understandable.
Staying Strong During Infertility
Once again we’ve created a bonus discussion guide for our much-appreciated supporters who are facing infertility. This guide will help you begin to talk through this challenge that you’re facing. Often it can be hard to talk about these things because it’s so sensitive. But having a discussion guide in hand gives you som...
Are you working from home, or thinking about working from home? In today’s episode, we want to show you how working from home could be a real positive for your marriage — but there are a few potential downsides that you need to be aware of too.
I’ve been working from home for a few years now, and Verlynda has been for much longer than I so we found this research pretty informative.
So does being in the home more help your marriage, or make things harder? Basically, the research suggests that the effect of working from home on marriage/family life is very subjective, depending on the type of work, the circumstances at home, and the personality and actions of the individual[i]. There are both potential upsides and downsides, and it's mainly up to the individual couple to make it work. Work vs. Marriage We did a full episode on work-family conflict but just to recap that quickly, when you are working from home it can be difficult to have distinct boundaries between work and family. You have the ability to deal with some family and marriage responsibilities and privileges during your workday and you also may choose to address some work matters during family time. Sometimes you may even find yourself functioning in both roles simultaneously[ii].
Further, it is easy for stress to spill over from one domain to the other. This carries a potentially negative impact and you can find yourself in a situation where work and marriage are competing for a limited amount of emotional and practical resources[iii]. Downsides of Working From Home (& What To Do About It) The Isolation is Real If you work from home and your spouse does not, it can become very lonely and isolating since you rarely see anyone else during the day. WFH can also result in a smaller social network and less perceived social support since there are less natural opportunities to interact with others. This can potentially lead to over-reliance on your spouse to meet all your social needs.
Individuals interviewed during a study in 2004[iv] compensated for this by being more intentional about developing social networks: for example by joining professional support networks of people in similar positions or being more intentional about connecting with friends and family.
Certain personality traits, such as introversion, autonomy, and high levels of self-motivation are also helpful (but not essential) in dealing with the isolated nature of working from home[v]. There are definitely certain people for whom working on your own comes more naturally, but most people can still make it work. Where Do You Vent Your Stress? When working from home it is much easier for work-related stress to impact marital and family relationships, since both roles are happening in the same place, possibly at the same time. It is therefore very important that home workers learn to manage stress and learn the skills needed to handle their work responsibilities effectively. A study in this in 2000[vi] identified self-discipline as being the most important trait for successful home working so that you are pointing your stress in the right direction and adhering to healthy coping and stress-reduction strategies.
The relationship could also go the other way: stress from the marriage (eg due to conflict) will have much more of an impact on work. Creating a stable, healthy marriage therefore also needs to be a priority for home workers. Caring For Young Children How do children affect this dynamic? Research in 2008[vii] found that for many mothers with young children, working from home could increase their stress levels. The demands of caring for young children significantly interfered with their ability to work and meant that they had no respite from either role since both were based on the home.
Family structure could alleviate some of this stress in some circumstances. For example, if both spouse work from home then sharing the childcare could become easier. Likewise,
Competing with your spouse: is it good, is it bad? Or like us — if you’re playing mini-golf — it’s just plain ugly! At least, as ugly as Caleb’s putting skills…
Oh…snap!
For some couples, competitiveness is just a bit of fun: even though it may feel like life or death when you’re at the final hole of the mini-golf course, it doesn’t really have much impact on your marriage. But for others, competitiveness is more of a lifestyle thing: you’re trying to compete with each other in all areas of life. Can competitiveness in any form be good for marriage? Two Kinds of Competitiveness There are two different forms of competitiveness as a personality trait.[i] The difference is to do with what motivates you to want to do well.
Competing to win: that is about being highly competitive because you enjoy winning and beating other people. At extreme levels, competing to win is called hyper-competitiveness: “an indiscriminate need to compete and succeed at any cost[ii]”. Competing to excel: this is about being highly competitive in order to surpass your personal goals and grow as a person. In effect, competing with yourself. This also gets called personal development competitiveness.
Obviously, these are two different kinds of competitiveness that have different causes and will impact marriages differently.
While neither style of competitiveness is directly linked to marital satisfaction, each one creates behaviours and attitudes that do have a very real impact on marriage and on other relationships as well. Let’s look at each one in turn. Competing to Excel (Personal Development Competitiveness) Whereas competing to win normally involves being motivated to beat somebody else, competing to excel is simply about individual accomplishment and doing the best you can, irrespective of how you compare to others.
Since this form of competitiveness is not dependent on other people losing in order for you to win, it does not lead to negative forms of competition and is positively linked to collaboration and communal connectedness[iii]. Wanting to be your best doesn’t stop other people from being their best too: in fact, it often helps them.
Within marriage, this makes couples more likely to adopt a joint perspective and to resolve conflict in ways that benefit both spouses. Competing to excel is also linked to positive personality traits and behaviors which are good for marriage, such as[iv]:
High self-esteem Lower rates of depression Higher positivity Higher resilience to adversity and the ability to cope with bad circumstances Higher desire to learn new skills and improve as a person Higher internal motivation, leading to better performance in areas such as work
So that kind of competitiveness in marriage is not really something that will typically come between the spouses. It is healthy. And not all couples or even spouses within a couple will have the same level of competitiveness and that’s OK. Competing to Win Competing to win is a little more nuanced. There are still positives here but some potential issues.
A desire to win and succeed is a basic human motivation. Some level of desire to win and do well is required to function in most areas of life as it provides motivation[v]. I mean, if you weren’t motivated to do well, you’d struggle to really get anywhere in life, right?
Now think about this in a marriage context. Healthy levels of competing to win within a marriage are probably harmless. Likely fun, as well. Possibly even good for marital satisfaction especially if both spouses share it equally.
To look at this in a bit more detail, a study in 2015[vi] examined couples who participated in competitive sports as a shared leisure activity. He found that couples who were evenly matched in skill level had high satisfaction with their leisure time, leading to high marital satisfaction. He concluded that these couples would enjoy the challenge of playing against each other and take satisfaction from ...
Is it better to put more energy into your marriage, or should raising your kids properly be your first concern? If you think pouring your everything into your little munchkins is the best way to do things, then this episode may be a bit of an eye-opener for you. We’re going to unpack the relationship between happy marriages and happy parenting and happy kids. And it may not be what you expect to hear.
Think of Your Family as a System Let me start with a little bit of psychobabble here but I’ll keep it simple. I want you to think of your little family unit as a system. In other words, it is made up of some moving parts and some groups of parts. The whole family, dad, mom, and children, are one system. But there are subsystems within it. And these subsystems interact and influence one another and the family as a whole. For example, your marriage is a subsystem of your family system. The mother-son relationship is a subsystem.
The reason why we need to talk about systems is because it helps us understand that one system can affect another, as well as the family as a whole. For example, the marital relationship can affect parenting relationships, and vice versa[i].
Since the whole family is one system, emotions and actions displayed in one of its subsystems can spill over into the others. For example, a husband who is good at attending to his wife’s needs will naturally be better at looking after his kids too, since similar traits and actions are involved. Equally, a husband who dislikes spending time with his wife and is hostile towards her will tend to be more hostile to his children too since the anger and resentment spill over[ii]
For that reason, it’s impossible to think about looking after your kids without also making your marriage a priority. Marital Satisfaction = Parenting Satisfaction Here’s a quote from one study: "A satisfying marital relationship is the cornerstone of happy family life, leading to more positive parent-child relationships and more congenial sibling relationships.[iii]".
Another study confirmed a strong link between marital satisfaction and "sensitive, warm and responsive parenting"[iv] (Pedro et al, 2012). This link is one way: marital satisfaction causes good parenting and good parent-child relationships, not the other way around.
In other words, you cannot improve your marriage by improving your parenting. But you can improve your parenting by improving your marriage.
I really think this is countercultural to a lot of what we see today where there is so much emphasis on pouring all the effort and investment into the children. What this research is showing, and we’ll learn more about this as we proceed, is that pouring effort into the marriage results in real benefits to the children.
The reverse is also true: low marital satisfaction leads to poor parenting. Emotionally distant spouses are often less supportive of their children and display less warmth, while marriages high in conflict often lead to more anger directed at the children[v].
Where this is particularly tricky is if you kind of give up on your spouse and pour effort into your children hoping you can redeem things there. I get why folks do that but if it is at all possible, the marriage is what needs your attention. Stepfamilies Are a Slight Exception There is one exception here. Yes, normally good parenting flows from a well-functioning marriage. But in step-families, the relationship actually runs both ways: marital satisfaction leads to better parenting of step-children but forming a healthy relationship with the step-children also creates a healthier marriage.
This is because in stepfamilies the step-parent typically does not have a pre-existing relationship with the children. Consequently, she or he has to work at developing a workable relationship with those children in the first stages of the marriage in order to create a stable household. We did a full episode on blended families a while back but it’s worth pointing ...
Ever get the feeling that your arguments as a couple are going nowhere? Or maybe you find yourself thinking, “There has to be a better way to solve conflict than this!” Well, there is: turns out there are some essential skills that work for both husbands and wives and can actually lead to deeper intimacy rather than lingering resentments.
Figuring Out Why Someone is Upset Can Be Hard Let’s just acknowledge right off the bat that it is normal for married folk to struggle with figuring out what the argument is really about.
Turns out there are several possible reasons for this[i]:
Your spouse may not want to share all that they are actually feeling: due to fear of vulnerability. It can be hard for you to see what emotions they are conveying in the heat of the moment. Especially if you are trying to focus on your own thoughts and opinions. Conflict and arguments tend to move very fast, making it hard to go back and question (with curiosity) what your spouse was actually trying to say. Deeper or core issues often show up as distress about specific issues. It is hard to see past the superficial or triggering issue and get to that deeper layer and really solve the problem. During conflict, you may not even want to see what emotions your spouse is conveying. Both of you are so worked up that you just end up saying negative things and reacting to reactions, rather than actually trying to discern and resolve the deeper issue.
All that to say: give yourself and your spouse some compassion and try slowing things down. It is hard to figure things out and it takes patience and commitment. Empathic Accuracy Matters One of the keys to unlocking the mystery of what your spouse is really upset about is this thing called empathic accuracy. Don’t worry, we’ll make this concept easy to grasp: empathic accuracy is your ability to accurately discern what your spouse is feeling, and why[ii].
The reason you need to get good at empathic accuracy is that this skill is central to resolving conflict, forgiving one another, and building overall marital satisfaction[iii]. This empathic accuracy is the skill of learning to understand one another…sometimes you often hear people talk about soul-mates as if it is some magic woo-woo pixie dust that gets sprinkled on a few lucky couples by the marriage fairy.
Not so: if you learn to do this empathic accuracy thing, you’ll be well on your way towards that soul-mate experience with your spouse. It is a skill anyone can learn, and the research shows that empathic accuracy increased marital satisfaction because it prompts spouses to respond differently to one another. Instead of blundering about in emotional darkness, think what your marriage would be like if you were really attuned to your wife or to your husband. Dialed into what was going on and able to respond accurately and appropriately.
Well, I hope I’ve sold you on empathic accuracy. Now: how to learn this skill? How To Develop Empathic Accuracy Emotional Validation The first technique you need to learn is emotional validation. This is simply expressing the empathy toward your spouse when they are upset or when you are in conflict.
Follow me closely here: conflict is often triggered by incidental events or actions, but at a deeper level it is often driven or intensified by an underlying feeling of not being heard.
For example, if a wife is upset by something her husband did or said, and he does not acknowledge this properly then she will become more upset. How do we fail to respond properly? We get defensive, we blame the other person, we dismiss or minimize their concerns, or we just don’t know what to do so we stonewall them. When that happens then your spouse will become more upset.
At that point, the conflict is no longer about the inciting incident but about your spouse’s need to feel validated[iv].
This is such a key point because you can break out of this by learning validate your spouse’s feeling. Say something like,
This has to be one of the most common questions I get emailed about. Turns out, if you can take a little time to understand why men or women react differently to the idea of counseling, then you can dial in your approach to help you and your spouse get the help you need!
Researchers estimate that at any point in time, in America, around 20% of marriages will be experiencing significant distress[i]. That’s a lot! It speaks to how much of our struggle is hidden from sight and from family, In fact, 28% of divorcing couples do not confide in family members about their marital problems prior to divorcing. And 63% of divorcees do not attend any kind of relationship counseling prior to divorce. Further, couples who do seek help wait an average of six years before doing so[ii].
That needs to change: there’s help available. Unfortunately, popular media has made divorce appear cheap and easy and they fail to disclose the real emotional, relational, spiritual and financial costs of divorce.
So today we’re going to be talking about how to get your spouse into marriage counseling. This isn’t just an ad for our own virtual counseling agency but a research-based discussion about how to overcome this challenge effectively without being manipulative or sneaky. Why Do Couples NOT Seek Help? First, there are practical concerns: things like feeling there is a lack of time and money. Sometimes it is just a lack of awareness that good help can be had. And, in some cases, if you’re in a rural area there may seem to be a lack of available services. Although the increasing number of virtual agencies such as hours has done a lot to fill that need.
Second, there’s often a stigma around seeking help for your marriage. Especially for men. Men tend to act more self-reliant and more in control and so we’re less inclined to seek help regarding emotional issues. Researchers note that typical masculine beliefs such as self-reliance and emotional suppression are negatively correlated to a willingness to get help. So the stronger those things are in a guy’s character, the less willing he will be to get help. Typically.
One study even found that most men would only consider marital counseling appropriate in situations relating to divorce or abuse[iii]. Obviously, we think there’s a lot of other reasons you’d want to consider counseling: hopefully before you get to a place where divorce is on the table.
Of course, women are not immune to stigma either. Seeking marriage counseling can be seen as an admission that your marriage is failing. That’s a difficult admission. That requires you to recognize the seriousness of your problems and open yourself up to scrutiny. Some even fear that getting counseling may be dangerous to the relationship: by admitting how serious the problems are, you may feel that you are signaling the end of the relationship[iv]. So taking that step towards counseling is certainly courageous.
There are other variables too. Women are much more likely to want to seek help than men. Interestingly, older couples are generally more willing to seek external help. That fits what I see in my practice: I think the statistic is that half of divorces (not marriages) occur in the first 7 years of marriage. I rarely see couples in counseling in the single digits of their marriage. And yet, that’s a great time to do counseling: taking the step of spotting your challenges early and getting help before they become massive issues can save you a lot of trouble later on down the line.
There are also socioeconomic factors: couples who are more well off, and couples who are more highly educated are more likely to seek marriage counseling, presumably due to being more aware of the benefits it can offer, and having the financial resources to utilize it. Of course, money doesn’t have to be a limitation: learning to budget and making this a priority in your spending can help you overcome any financial barriers. Your marriage is definitely worth investing in...
It seems like with chronic illness in marriage you either hear the extremes of horror stories or, on the other end of the spectrum, some very beautiful stories. I’ve heard of a wife getting a bad form of cancer, the husband deciding he just didn’t want to deal with that and bailing out on her. And then there’s a much-loved couple in our own church and she developed Alzheimer’s fairly young and his response has been to double down on his faithfulness and care for her, saying, “I guess it’s my turn to pull the wagon now”.
Any kind of long-term illness can be extremely tough for married couples as one spouse struggles to cope with the symptoms and effects of illness and the other takes on a carer role, trying their best to look after their ailing spouse. It looks very different for each spouse, but for both it can be hard to know how to cope.
Instead of focusing on individual things each spouse can do, it is helpful to think in terms of joint coping: both spouses taking responsibility for coping with the illness and sharing stressors and resources[i]. Joint Coping with Health Problems What you need to know is the way you interact and respond to each other's coping strategies is just as important as the strategies themselves. For example, the non-ill spouse needs to be able to see what kind of support the ill spouse (called the "patient spouse" in the research) is in need of at any given time: do they need practical support, problem-solving, or emotional reassurance?
Coping as a couple is affected by two main factors: the patient and spouse's "appraisal" or understanding of the illness, and the coping strategies they use to deal with it. Appraisal of Illness How the patient and their spouse each view the illness will affect how well they support each other through it. There are three specific issues that we want to draw your attention to[ii]: Understanding of the Illness Do both spouses fully understand the nature, possible duration, and consequences of the illness? If an understanding of the illness differs between spouses this will naturally lead to different expectations of how much support is needed (e.g., if the spouse thinks the illness is not a very big deal then they will naturally put less effort into helping the patient spouse cope). So we want to be sure that both parties understand the scope and prognosis of the illness. Ownership of Illness Is the illness viewed as a joint problem, or as the patent spouse's problem which the other spouse may or may not be required to help with? Mismatches on this will again naturally lead to ineffective coping. This also raises the issue of togetherness: is the illness your problem or is it our problem? Broader Context How much support do you expect from your spouse, based on culture, family of origin etc? Were you raised to share all burdens between you, or to respect their independence and dignity by being more hands off? Again, different expectations here could lead to poor coping.
Different appraisals or expectations in these areas can lead to poor coping with the illness, so couples should try to make sure they are on the same page regarding the nature of the illness and how much support is required/desired. Dealing with Chronic Illness in Marriage When you look at all the ways a spouse can support their patient spouse, they fall into two main categories[iii]:
Problem-focused: providing practical support such as helping provide or facilitate treatment, assisting with practical needs or taking care of needs and responsibilities while the patient spouse is unable to Emotion-focused: providing emotional support to help the patient cope with the stress of the illness
Problem Focused Each of these styles of coping can be either helpful or unhelpful, depending on what you do.
Helpful problem-focused coping is often referred to as "active engagement": both spouses taking an active role in discussions with doctors, researching treatment options,
Life gets really busy and difficult to manage sometimes, and as we encounter some challenges we can lose sight of the forest for the trees. Maybe we have some unexplained health problems or even problems at work and we wonder what is going on? Obviously, there are many potential reasons, but have you considered that your unhappy marriage could be an underlying issue?
Today’s topic looks at problems caused by marriage problems. Obviously, the goal here is not to make you want to give up on your marriage, but rather, instead of thinking about solving your other problems so that your marriage will be better…what if you START with your marriage? Get into some good books or some marriage counselling with your spouse and get that sorted, and then see the cascading benefits of a happy marriage spill over into other areas.
So hear us out as we go through various facets of life and see what resonates. This is meant to be an eye opener, so just be curious and consider how helping your marriage could be a huge benefit to other areas in your life.
The first hidden cost of marriage problems for us to discuss is the area of mental health. Mental Health Is Impacted by Marital Woes Not surprisingly, research shows a strong link between marital problems and poor mental health.
For example, a major study in 2007[i] examined over 2000 married individuals and found that marital distress was a predictor of high levels of anxiety, mood disruption, and substance abuse. It was also linked to specific mental health conditions including bipolar disorder, alcohol abuse disorder, depression and general anxiety disorder. For depression, it was found that the longer the marital problems go on, the higher the risk becomes.
Again, we want to assert that the solution is not to get un-married! But rather to pursue the healing of your marriage!
How do marital woes potentially contribute to mental health problems? Another study in 2005[ii] examined how marital distress can create mental health problems and found several mediating factors:
Attribution style (see below — basically, you’re more likely to pay attention to negative things) Conflict style: especially demand-withdraw cycles and avoidance of conflict. These are normal patterns for distressed marriages. Attachment style: ambivalent or avoidant attachment. Not pursuing healing for attachment issues can impact mental health.
The flip side of this is you can see that marriage becomes something of a crucible for personal growth. Getting these conflict, attribution and attachment issues dealt with can turn your mental health challenges around. Again, another reason to stay in your marriage and sort this stuff out. Really, if you just go for escape you’re going to carry the same issues to the next marriage. Physical Health Costs from Marriage Problems The impact of marriage problems extends into the physical realm as well.
Research from 1997[iii] found that high levels of conflict and marital distress lead to various physical health problems, such as higher blood pressure and a weaker immune system. This effect was stronger for women than for men. One explanation for the gender effect is that women typically feel and express more negative emotions during conflict while men withdraw emotionally (known as the demand-withdraw cycle). It is this negative emotion and stress which causes the negative health effects[iv]. Of course, emotionally withdrawing isn’t going to be good for your marriage or your mental health, so we’re not saying that’s the better strategy here!
Other research highlights other health concerns for couples with low relationship satisfaction, such as higher risk of cardiovascular disease and even the possibility of higher mortality[v]. Again this effect is stronger for women than men. Marriage Difficulties Influence Work as Well Conflict and distress in your marriage can spill over into other areas of your life, particularly work.
Initially, I was a little hesitant about this episode. Dealing with criticism? Sounded like it was going to be a real drain. But as we looked into the research we actually found a lot of hope, not only for you if you are on the receiving end of the criticism, but even for the critic as well.
I feel like I need to say right off the bat that we are not attempting to minimize the destructive potential of criticism in our episode today. In fact, it may even be worth checking out our mini-series on abuse as sometimes I have had women come to me just thinking their spouse is critical not realizing that there is a profound belief system in place that is fundamentally abusive.
On the flip side of that coin, there is a lot of plain misbehavior and bad attitude that gets labeled abuse that is really not abuse. And I think there is a difference between verbal abuse and emotional abuse. The first is using words to hurt someone which is something we have all done in our lives, and the second is a conscious or subconscious systematic attempt to undermine someone’s self-worth and dignity. Neither are acceptable but the latter is particularly damaging.
Today we are staying on the lighter end of the spectrum in the bad behavior category. So this is not particularly about abuse, but just about the critical rut that we or our spouse can get into and what to do about that if you’re on the receiving end. Understanding Where the Criticism Comes From I think the first step to creating some safe space around criticism is to actually take a step back and understand where criticism comes from. The nature of criticism is that it wants you to think there’s something wrong with you. But when you see or experience criticism I think it is worth considering where that may actually be coming from. So instead of focusing internally on yourself as the target, focus on the source. Attribution: What is The Critic Actually Unhappy About? Attribution is such an important piece in any marriage. The human mind naturally interprets things around it in line with its current mood and beliefs. If someone is happy, they are more likely to interpret things around them as being positive, and more likely to see positive things and ignore negative[i]. If they are unhappy, the reverse is true.
In marriage, this means that someone who is happy with their spouse and with the relationship will see lots of things to be happy about, and interpret what their spouse does in a positive way. But someone who is dissatisfied with the marriage will see more reasons to be unhappy, and interpret things in a more negative way, thus leading to negativity and criticism[ii].
The point here is to take a step back and ask yourself am I doing something upsetting or wrong or inconsiderate that I should genuinely be considering? Or are there other circumstances in our marriage or in our lives generally that are leading my spouse to be critical of me?
This is very nuanced to sort out. Let me give you a couple of examples. Your spouse may have lost his job and his dad is in the hospital with cancer and you’re receiving a lot of criticism. I’m not saying it’s OK for him to take that out on you, but you can at least make some space for your own mental well-being by acknowledging that this is about what is going on inside him emotionally and not actually about flaws in you. That’s a fairly clear example. We’ll talk about what to do in this kind of situation at the end of today’s show.
A tougher one to sort out is if the marriage is in distress. Typically both spouses have a role to play in a distressed marriage but if one spouse has poor conflict resolution skills s/he may try to correct the problem by pointing out all the perceived deficits in the other spouse. I know this may feel like a bit of a jump: but typically this is a desperate attempt to connect. The belief is that if these issues can be set aside by me pointing them out and you correcting them then we can be safe and be together.
Today’s episode is for those of you who just need to know that the hard work of creating a thriving, passionate marriage is worthwhile. Whatever you’ve been through, however difficult the road ahead appears to be: we really want to distill some hope for you today so that you stay committed to creating something beautiful with your spouse. Marriage is not always easy. But we want you to know it is worthwhile.
Today we’re going to take you through the top 5 benefits of creating a happy marriage. To come up with these top 5 benefits I asked our researcher Paul to go out and just survey the literature and see what the consistent themes are: the repeated positive outcomes that keep bubbling to the surface when researchers are studying marriage.
We are not knocking off anyone else’s top 5 list today: we put this one together from our own survey of the research. And good research at that: I am talking about the psychological journals where we have real researchers in the trenches trying to figure out the nuances and details of marriage every day, not just some Joe Average blogger’s opinion off the Internet.
So, let’s jump in. We’re going to work from the fifth benefit back to the first.
5: Personal Growth
The research consistently shows that a happy marriage enables spouses to grow, both individually and as a couple. This comes through mainly in three different fronts. Personal Goals It’s easier to meet personal challenges when you know someone has your back, right? Well married people often report that the level of support they get from their spouse is the strongest determining factor in how well they achieve their personal goals[i]. Your support of your spouse makes a big difference in his or her life. With your support, your spouse feels secure enough and has enough practical and emotional assistance to aim for their important goals in life, whatever they may be.
So creating a happy marriage ends up setting the stage for helping one another achieve personal goals. It is not hard to imagine how a distressed marriage takes up so much energy that it gets in the way of achieving those goals. Resilience A cool study from 2011[ii] found that overcoming stressful circumstances with your spouse early in the marriage makes you far more able to deal with stress later in life. In this study high marital satisfaction (especially good communication and support) enabled couples to build up resilience to stress, which helped them adjust to stressful life events such as the transition to parenthood. Other research shows that high marital quality can help couples cope with difficult circumstances such as financial pressure and illness[iii].
This is brilliant too: of course, life throws all of us curveballs. But when you create a happy marriage you create a safe harbor, a place you can come to in order to recharge and renew yourself for facing those challenges. And this ends up making you stronger in the long term. Growing Together When your marriage is going well you start to embody the traits you admire in each other, allowing you both to grow as people. High satisfaction with your marriage and with who your spouse naturally leads to the admiration of your spouse. When couples admire each other they work to embody the positive traits they see in each other. In a well-functioning marriage both spouses, therefore "sharpen" each other and help make each other better[iv].
“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another” Proverbs 27:17 NIV. That’s the principle at play here.
So you take these three together: facilitating personal goals, fostering resilience against challenges, and promoting personal development and you can really see how a happy marriage fuels personal growth. That’s a huge blessing that comes from creating a happy marriage.
4: Health
High marital satisfaction has positive effects on both physical and mental health. This happens through various routes[v]:
Lower stress: couples in a happy,
It’s hard to kick this episode off without thinking of that old Sunday School song, “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy down in my heart. Where? Down in my heart!”
Joy is that feeling of great pleasure and happiness that fills us in a more lasting way than a situational happiness. It’s something we believe can be a huge blessing in marriage so we want to help you figure out how to start increasing the joy you feel today.
Joy is considered one of the six "basic emotions", capable of being felt, expressed and recognized by anyone, regardless of culture. In case you were wondering, the others are sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust.[i]
I call these primary emotions: what they look like may vary from culture to culture: e.g., think of how sadness is expressed in our culture vs. in some African cultures. Ours is fairly reserved and silent wherein some African cultures there is a very vocal, collective wailing when expressing sadness. Yes, there is this primary emotion but it may look different for different cultures. Joy is one of those primary emotions. Happiness vs. Joy Happiness and joy are sometimes thought of as the same. But research, philosophy, and literature often describe happiness as something temporary, to be chased after and experienced, while joy is something deeper and more long lasting[ii]. People often talk about "finding happiness" but being "filled with joy". Happiness is more situational: some things make you happy and some things make you unhappy. Joy is something you carry with you and bring into situations so that you can have joy even in unpleasant circumstances[iii].
One verse in the Bible that really points out the deeper nature of joy is Romans 14:17 "For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” (ESV). I think this underscores the point that it’s not so much a momentary experience … like, wow, that was an awesome supper, but more of an abiding experience that is grounded deep within the human soul. Joy in Your Genes? The depth to which it is rooted in our being is something that has even caught the interest of geneticists. Research shows that there may be a genetic component to long-term happiness. People are said to have "baseline" level of joy determined by their personality, genes or upbringing. Their daily levels of happiness can go up and down from here but will naturally return to this baseline level[iv].
Research also suggests that as much as 50% of your overall level of joy (lifetime happiness) is accounted for by your personality and genetics. Only 10% is related to your circumstances, and 40% is to do with the activities you choose to take part in[v]. I’m not sure how they arrived at those figures but this means that some people will naturally find it easier to experience joy than others.
However, it is possible to increase your baseline level of joy, through developing positive personality traits and engaging in activities that increase your happiness, which we’ll look into in a moment. When you do so, your daily variations in happiness will all revolve around this new fixed point. So your happiness levels will be higher regardless of circumstances.
In other words, we arrive with a certain baseline but we can still move the needle. And if you could move the needle on your joy starting from today, how would that impact your marriage? Increasing Joy Let’s now look at exactly how you can have more joy in your marriage. There are a few things to consider. Attentiveness Impacts Joy A study in 2000[vi] assessed 43 couples to find out what were the biggest factors affecting their long-term levels of joy. Two of the strongest predictors of joy were:
Expressions of fondness Awareness of and attentiveness to the marriage and to the needs of your spouse
So those are two great things to start working on in your marriage right away. Friendship Stimulates Joy One of the biggest reasons to be joyful in life is a happ...
There’s no doubt in 2018 that sexual abuse is a real issue and also one that is not uncommon. 16% of men and 25% of women have experienced some form of sexual abuse[i]. While a lot of the focus in recent months has been on bringing perpetrators to justice, what about the impact of sexual abuse on married life? Not only that, but how can you facilitate the healing and wholeness of your spouse if he or she has been sexually abused?
As a society, we’re getting better at talking about sexual abuse and recognizing it as a serious issue that impacts a huge number of men and women. But the impact of sexual abuse on a person doesn’t go away once the perpetrator has been caught. Abuse carries on affecting a person for their entire lives and can impact all future relationships the abuse survivor forms, including their marriage. How Sexual Abuse Affects a Person I think it is important to talk about this part because there may be some of our readers who either know their spouse has been sexually abused but don’t really see exactly what the impact is, or maybe they see signs of sexual abuse but don’t know what the underlying wound is. Perhaps this may open a conversation that could help your spouse on their healing journey.
A study in 2005[ii] studied a sample of 9000 American adults and found that prior sexual abuse as a child increased the risk of several issues in adulthood:
Increased risk of alcohol problems: 19% of abuse survivors compared to 12% of normal population Increased risk of substance/drug abuse: 24% compared to 16% Suicide attempts: 4.1% compared to 1.5% Depression: 11.8% compared to 7.9%
These effects are similar for both men and women: sexual abuse increases your likelihood of experiencing all of these issues.
What I hope you see is that the increase over normal population validates the severe emotional distress that sexual abuse brings. Of course, the good news is that healing is possible. Even though history cannot be rewritten, it is possible to recover from the trauma of sexual abuse.
Let’s look at some specific issues and behaviors that are often signs of sexual abuse. Helplessness and Sexual Abuse Helplessness is a very real impact that comes from sexual abuse.
Experiencing sexual abuse is a traumatic situation over which a person often has no control. Or at least, they don’t have the adult wisdom and knowledge to have said “No” back when they were a child.
The person may then learn a sense of helplessness which affects their expectations and judgment for years to come[iii]. Helplessness and perceived lack of control over your life can lead to alcohol and substance dependency, and are also a cause of (and symptom of) mental illness such as depression. Other Kinds of Trauma If childhood sexual abuse occurs in conjunction with others traumatic events in childhood, such as physical violence, neglect or being taken into institutional care, these all dramatically increase the risk factors for mental illness over and above what these factors individually would cause[iv]. How Past Sexual Abuse Affects Marriage I want to be careful when going through these issues. There’s a fine line between acknowledging the impact and, from that, honoring the difficult journey that survivors face versus really pathologizing all the effects of sexual abuse and making the survivor really feel like they are damaged goods.
I guess in light of this I would say that we are all broken. While the abuse was not your fault and should not have happened, healing is your choice and something that you can make happen. So we acknowledge the past but also really want to honor the healing ability and resilience of survivors as well. Perhaps you are seeing some of these effects in your marriage. If so, think about what you might want to do to help yourself overcome these challenges and create a new chapter in your story that celebrates victory and healing. Marital Quality Research in 2005[v] found that childhood sexual abuse ca...
We have a tough topic today — and unfortunately, it’s also one that is all too common. What do you do when your spouse is a chronic liar? Well, we are going to try to come to this topic with accountability and compassion because trust is so vital to creating a happy marriage.
What is Pathological Lying? There are a few terms that get used interchangeably here: compulsive lying, chronic lying, and pathological lying. Like some other psychological terms it can get thrown around too loosely. Somebody lies to you a couple times and it upsets you and you call them a pathological liar: that may not be an accurate assessment.
But when you have frequent, compulsive telling of lies and false stories[i] this is a pathological lying disorder. Typically the lies told have three features:
Continuous: the lies are told regardless of context or who is being spoken to, without any apparent benefit or motive and no thought of potential consequences Impulsive: the lies are not necessarily intended to manipulate people or gain anything. The person simply sees an opportunity to lie and does so. Compulsive: lies are often told automatically without any conscious decision.
Those are a pretty serious set of criteria. That’s why I say we use the label too freely: there’s a much lower level of lying that is still problematic but strictly speaking, pathological lying should have all these components.
Along with this you’ll often see that the compulsive liar, when challenged about his or her lies, may attempt to downplay what was said or may try to get out of it by telling more lies. They often get caught up in a web of increasingly unrealistic lies.
It’s also helpful to know that someone who is a pathological liar may be mentally well adjusted in every other way, or they may have other difficulties such s personality disorders (especially narcissistic personality disorder), ADHD or memory problems[ii]. What Makes A Chronic Liar? Let’s talk about some possible causes. Not for the purpose of justifying the behaviour or asking you to be OK with it, but just to create a little compassion and hopefully even some possible treatment strategies. Brain Functioning and Lying Serious forms of chronic lying may be due to differences at the brain level. Neuroimaging of patients who show compulsive lying reveals impairments to the prefrontal cortex[iii]. These impairments could be caused by head injury, degenerative diseases, infection, epilepsy, or be present from birth. This impairment affects two important mental processes: Executive Functioning The first process, executive functioning, is about the ability to control and monitor your own thoughts, as well as control impulses and organize yourself
Problems with executive functioning may look like difficulty with controlling the impulse to lie. If your executive functioning is intact, when the cop pulls you over you may be tempted to lie to him or her but your executive function kicks in and you realize, no my kids are in the car, I need to be truthful and do some good role modelling here. If your executive function is impaired you might not ever get out in front of that initial impulse.
Sometimes people get upset with me when I point out the possible physiological basis for these kinds of issues — am I trying to excuse or to minimize something that is morally wrong? No, I am not. But if the person cannot stop and sincerely wants to stop and all you are doing to try to motivate them to stop is using moralistic interventions (impressing them with how wrong it is, how God hates lies, and Satan is the father of lies)... that’s all true but it is not going to actually help them stop if there’s a head injury. They need a different approach to try to achieve the same outcome. Although the symptoms are a moral issue, the cause may not be a purely moral problem: it could potentially be physiological as well (e.g., due to a brain injury). Theory of Mind The second process, known as theory of mind,
Today’s topic is like a coin: one object with two sides. In this episode one side of the coin is increasing the love and the other side of the coin is increasing (or becoming more aware of) “the feel” of love. It’s not only deepening our love but become more aware of how and when we actually are aware of that feeling in our bodies.
Who doesn’t want to feel more love in their life? In many marriages love becomes a fact, rather than a feeling: you know you love your spouse but you don’t feel it especially often. And that’s good: love should definitely be more than just a gooey feeling. But wouldn’t it be nice to have more of the feeling too? Learning to Label Love Let’s look at what happens when we experience emotions. Feeling emotions such as love happens in two steps. These are usually subconscious steps:
Experiencing the sensations and bodily experiences. Don’t forget that a feeling is called that because you feel it. Sometimes it’s helpful to say it like this: love is an emotion. When you experience that emotion, you know you are experiencing it because you feel it in your body. Otherwise how would you know you are experiencing that emotion? It has to register in the body as a feeling. That then is your felt emotion. Next, you have to interpret and label that bodily sensation as a specific emotion. Usually, you do that based on the context and also based on starting to build a history of when you have experienced that bodily sensation before.
So when I first meet with clients who are not very aware of their own emotions I often will ask, “What are you feeling in your body?” They’ll describe it very physically: tightness in my chest; tension in my neck; warm spot right here. Then I’ll ask, “And when have you felt that in the past?” The gears will start to turn and pretty soon we’ve started to catalog our feelings and become aware of them.
This happens for both positive and negative emotions. So someone who starts to shake or experiences a rise in their heart rate when seeing a spider would interpret this as fear. Or someone who feels happiness and a warm glow when in the presence of their spouse will experience this as love for that person.
So in order to increase feelings of love for your spouse you need to both experience the sensations, and then label them as love for your spouse. Let’s look at each step. Experiencing Love Experiencing positive emotions in the company of your spouse will cause you to feel more in love with them. Makes sense! This can include pretty much any kind of positive experience, such as[i]:
Shared leisure activities Sex New and exciting experiences Romantic gestures Acts of kindness Having your emotional needs met
It is good to pause and consider a list like that: notice those are behaviors. Feelings like love are often triggered by what we do, rather than what we think. How many of those do you extend to your spouse as part of your regular interactions?
Those are positive experiences towards love. Note that you can also have negative experiences or emotions related to love too. Feelings of jealousy or rejection or frustration can also lead to feelings of love towards someone[ii]. If a clerk in a store brushes you off you may not be rattled, but if your spouse does this, a strong negative response on your part will likely (to some degree) indicate something of the fact that you care for your spouse.
I have said to husbands in counseling: do you hear her getting louder? She is raising her voice because you really matter to her. If she truly did not care, she would not even bother with the effort. Putting Words to Love So if you are able to label love and to identify when you are experiencing it then the next important piece is to put words to it.
Often, we say “I love you” reflexively or contextually rather than experientially. Meaning I say it because you just said it to me, or did something obvious to generate it. That’s not wrong.
What is a hug without the squeeze? In America, they’ll tell you that’s like apple pie without the cheese. We prefer ice cream with our pie but we definitely like our hugs with the right amount of squeeze. Turns out, however, that hugging has been studied fairly carefully in the research!
Hugging is Old School The word "hug" originates from the Saxon word "hog" meaning "to be tender to" and the old Norse word "höggva", meaning "to catch or seize[i]". Hugging has been around at least since Biblical times, for example brothers Jacob and Esau hugging when reunited in the book of Genesis. It is not just a modern phenomenon but something that is a long-standing part of human history.
We’re going to have some fun and some research with this subject today — let’s look at some fun facts related to hugging. Fun Facts Tree Hugging Turns out there are some cultures who believe that hugging trees can help restore your body and mind. In remote areas of Finland, hugging snow-covered trees is used as a kind of meditation or spiritual practice to connect with nature. This is now becoming a tourist trade where people travel into the wilderness to hug trees. Not my idea of a romantic getaway, but whatever works for you. National Hugging Day January 21st is National Hugging day in the US and other countries, founded in 1986 to promote healthy expression of emotion.
I’m going to have to mark that one down on my calendar. Self Hug Machines Got no-one to hug you? Never fear — science has your back. The "Sense Roid" is a recently invented machine that recreates the sensation of being hugged using a mannequin with pressure receptors and a jacket with artificial muscles that constrict to give the sensation of being hugged. The idea behind it was that hugs are better when you are hugging someone you are intimate with, and who are you more intimate with than yourself? So now you can get the benefits of hugging without needing other people. Maybe. Should You Hug Dogs? Good question. Research shows that while many pet owners like hugging their pets, most animals don't appreciate it. For example 8 out of 10 dogs show signs of distress when hugged, as it restrains them and prevents them from being able to get away. I guarantee that every dog owner reading this is now thinking “well my dog is obviously one of the 2 out of 10 who loves hugs!” Cultural Rules Hugging as a greeting varies a lot between cultures. In some places a hug with one or more kisses is the normal greeting for friends and acquaintance, in some countries any kind of physical touch would be an offence. In some countries such as France the rules on an appropriate greeting even vary between cities. Some examples (from most to least contact):
Paris: Hug and four kisses Netherlands, Switzerland, Brittany: hug and three kisses Spain, Austria: hug and two kisses Belgium: one kiss Germany, Italy, UK, America: hug with close friends/family only Thailand, Japan: no physical contact. Just a bow!
Got all that? Good. Don’t want to look like an idiot going in for too many kisses. Ok, let’s move on to the actual science of what makes hugging great. The Science of Hugging Hugging Releases Oxytocin Oxytocin is the brain's "love hormone" which creates attachment between spouses and increases feelings of affection, empathy and bonding. Oxytocin is released through hugging[ii]. Meaning that hugs don’t just feel great, they work to strengthen the bond between you and your spouse. Hugging Activates Pressure Receptors There are pressure receptors all over the body which respond to physical touch. When those receptors are gently activated by hugging, they prompt chemical changes in the brain such as reducing the stress hormone cortisol increasing endorphins and serotinin, as well as lowering heart rate and blood pressure[iii].
Very cool. Hugging Promotes Support and Belonging As well as these chemical changes there are more conscious psychological benefits to hugging.
Today’s episode is going to be one that will be a complete light-bulb moment for some of our listeners... or else more of a fascinating-and-helpful but not especially relevant episode for many others. Love addiction is a real issue in some marriages, often with devastating consequences. What makes it particularly tricky to understand is that it’s like normal love between couples, but stuck in that early infatuation stage.
Love Addiction I don’t know if you’re like me but I like being in love. A lot. With Verlynda. And you hear the term “love addiction” and it’s easy to think — whoa? I might have that!
But love addiction isn’t the strong, committed, healthy and life-giving love that married couples pursue. It’s really about being addicted to or obsessing over falling in love and the “rush” of new relationships.
People with love addiction constantly chase the excitement, romance and passion of the first stages of a romantic relationship. And then when this initial intense pleasure wears off, they become less interested in maintaining the relationship and often leave in hopes of recapturing that intense passion with someone else.
The brain has to make sense of this, of course. So love addicts will often believe that what they are searching for is true love, and so they hope to find a spouse with whom they can maintain these intense feelings of romantic love forever. However, since the brain is not wired for this, this is an unachievable outcome. Consequently, if they choose to stay in a relationship, love addicts will become dissatisfied and may possibly go to extreme lengths to try and recapture the “magic” of the early relationship stages.
Research estimates that between 5 and 10% of the adult population suffer from love addiction to some degree[i]. The High of Love Feelings of romantic love in the first stages of a relationship release chemical such as dopamine and adrenaline in the brain. This creates feelings of intense pleasure and energy as well as sexual arousal. These are the same chemicals released during sex and when abusing drugs such as cocaine and heroin[ii].
Romantic love activates the unconscious reward system in the brain. This motivates a person to want to keep experiencing more. It also causes people to intensely focus their attention on the source of the pleasure (in this case the romantic partner). It also creates feelings of obsession and a desire to pursue the partner[iii].
Please understand: this is part of normal, healthy love in the development of a new relationship. Being totally infatuated with your partner and desiring to spend time with them is a good thing, right? It is not a problem in itself. It only becomes a problem when a person chases these feelings and views them as more important than the relationship itself.
If you end up exclusively pursuing the intense feelings of passion, arousal and excitement that come at the start of a relationship, then the chemical processes of love can create behavior cycles very similar to other forms of addiction where the addict gets hooked on the rush of feel-good chemicals. They come to see romance and love as the only ways they can experience this feeling. Of course, this could be a subconscious realization.
Typically the intense stage of romantic love only lasts up to 18 months before being replaced with the less intense "companionate love". So continually chasing this feeling and being dependant on it leads to very unhealthy, immature relationships, or to the person repeatedly breaking off their relationships in search of new ones. When Love Addiction is Harmful Some researchers argue that even normal, healthy love has a lot of similarities to addiction[iv]. Love produces feelings of intense pleasure, motivates a person to keep seeking contact with the source of this pleasure (the other person), can create feelings of obsession and can cause feelings of sadness when the object of your desire is not available.
Sometimes assertiveness gets a bad rap in our culture. As if it’s a domineering or bossy attitude. Not so: in reality, healthy assertiveness is a really helpful tool for marriage communication because it can reduce conflict and increase the quality of your marriage.
What is Assertiveness? Assertiveness can often get confused with other, less positive traits, so let’s start with a nice simple definition. Assertiveness is the ability to honestly and effectively express your needs and desires[i].
The opposite is passivity: letting things happen to you, not stating your needs and backing down easily.
What about aggression though? Assertiveness is different to aggression: assertiveness is about using self-confidence and verbal techniques to state what you want, rather than resorting to threats or intimidation.
What does assertiveness look like? Recent research identifies multiple parts of effective assertive behavior:
Courage: self-confidence, boldness to state your needs and "stick to your guns", being direct but non-aggressive, having belief in your own ability and strong social skills[ii]. Authenticity: honesty and genuineness, rather than being manipulative or artificial. It is coming out and stating what you want directly rather than using coded language or suggestions or vague hints. Assertiveness is based on an honest awareness of yourself and respect for the other person[iii]. Autonomy: able to make your own decisions, being self motivated and also flexible. Empathy: the ability to express your own needs while also being aware of the needs of your spouse or others[iv]. It is not necessarily (and should not be) selfish.
Factors Affecting Assertiveness There are a few traits and factors that can affect your ability to be assertive. Locus of Control Who has control in your life? Locus of control refers to what people see as being the main controlling and decision-making factors in their lives. Someone with an internal locus of control believes that they can make their own choices and results in life are determined by their own actions and efforts. Someone with external locus of control believes their outcomes in life are mostly up to luck, fate or the influence of other people.
A study in 1979[v] found that assertiveness was linked to an internal locus of control in married couples: spouses who believe they are in control of their own outcomes in life will naturally develop the social skills needed to influence others, while believing you have little control over your own life leads people to become passive. If you think things are just done to you or for you without any sense of personal agency that is a very passive orientation and assertiveness will seem foreign to you. Trust That same study also identified trust as a variable that influenced assertive behavior in married couples.
Spouses who had an external locus of control (those who thought that other people had a strong influence over their lives) and who had high levels of trust that their spouse would act in the best interests of the marriage tended to be low in assertiveness. They interpret this to mean that people who have high trust that their spouses are acting in the interests of the marriage would have no NEED to act assertively. If you have a great marriage where you’re both working for each other’s benefit then sticking up for your own needs isn’t as essential… but it’s still a useful skill to have up your sleeve. Relationship Focused Couples who adopt a relationship-focused mindset early in the marriage (making decisions together and prioritizing their relationship over individual gains) are better able to learn positive communication skills such as assertiveness[vi]. Although as noted above, if both spouses are thinking in the best interests of the marriage there may not be much need to act assertively. But they will still have these skills if needed. Beliefs Your ability to be assertive is partly based on your beliefs about yoursel...
Today we’re going to be looking at therapeutic or trial separation- the idea of spending some time apart to heal your marriage. For many couples who feel like their marriage is at the end of its tether, this kind of separation might be something to consider. But you need to be aware of the risks and possible outcomes going in.
I think we should state very clearly that our vision is to help people create thriving, passionate marriages. At the same time, we realize that folks often come to our podcast or website or to us for counseling in a great deal of distress. So when we’re talking about therapeutic separation today this is with the goal of restoring your marriage, as long as it is safe to do that.
On the safety note: if you are in an abusive situation a different approach is necessary — please see our shows on abuse. You may still pursue separation but you will not likely be safe to do so in the way we’re about to describe.
What Is Therapeutic Separation? Let’s start by laying out what exactly a therapeutic separation looks like. A marriage and family counselor called Patrick Ward[i] sets out a helpful framework for a trial separation and the circumstances under which it may be useful.
A therapeutic separation is defined as a fixed period of separation, during with time the decision to divorce or stay together is postponed. In other words — a therapeutic separation is not a preamble or step towards divorce or even a trial of what it would be like to live without your spouse. It always set up with a view to restoration.
That has to be a sincere commitment for both parties.
The objective of a therapeutic separation is to address the negative feelings that one or both of you might have about staying in the marriage. Sometimes it can also be used as an intervention if one spouse is not really accepting the reality of their own addiction problem or if they are not willing to address their own hurtful ways of interaction with their spouse. Possible Reasons that Make a Therapeutic Separation Appropriate There could be a wider variety of reasons than this, but here are some common areas that may prompt a therapeutic separation:
Extreme or persistent marital conflict One or both spouses feeling high levels of frustration or lack of satisfaction from the marriage Harmful patterns of interaction such as abuse, addiction, neglect or control Indecision about whether one or both spouses want to remain in the marriage
Ways Therapeutic Separation Can Help Some possible benefits may include:
Acknowledging the seriousness of problems. It can be helpful or validating for both spouses to see that you each willing to go to extreme lengths to try and save the marriage. Separation can create a “crisis point” which shakes the couple out of denial and forces them to take action to save the marriage. Relief from unproductive conflict and negative cycles of interaction. If left untreated, daily conflicts and bad habits can end up damaging a marriage more than being apart for a time. Separation can help break this cycle Breaking the tendency to take each other for granted. Spouses get to see how hard life might actually be if they separated. This can be a reality check to think about the positives and stop taking one’s spouse for granted. Gaining a sense of independence and self-control. Sometimes if couples are unhealthily dependant on each other, separation can teach them some valuable self-reliance and allow them to reunite as stronger, more differentiated individuals.
Those are benefits identified by one researcher[ii]. Here are some other possible benefits:
Perspective: separation can provide a "cooling off" period for couples who see their difficulties as insurmountable. The time apart can allow spouses to deeply reflect on the marriage more objectively, without the pressure of being in conflict all the time[iii]. By gaining new perspectives, and new life experiences from living apart,
Adult Children of Alcoholics — did you know that was a thing? ACOA’s are what we call them for short. If you’re an ACOA it means you had at least one parent with a history of alcoholism, or possibly even a grandparent. The issues you faced as a child can continue to affect the entire family, including the way you relate to others in your life today.
Background to ACOA An alcoholic parent or caregiver affects the entire family. Their addiction, the way alcohol makes them behave, their absences and mood swings will all have an impact on you growing up. Being raised in this kind of environment means each family member has to learn to adapt and react to the alcoholic's behavior. You have to learn strategies to cope with the chaotic family environment. These coping strategies often stay with the children into adult life and affect how you may now relate to others as an adult.
An ACOA can therefore show unhelpful ways of relating to other people, based on the way they had to relate to people as a child. This includes issues such as an excessive need for control, over-reliance on the opinion of others, emotional distance, lack of trust and difficulties being open and vulnerable.
These are all strategies which may have helped them survive in a household with an alcoholic parent but as adults lead to "rigid, controlling behaviors that interfere with individual growth... and the formation of healthy relationships[i]”.
ACOAs can also show personal problems caused by the difficulties in their family of origin, including[ii] :
Substance abuse Mood disorders such as depression Low self-esteem Underachievement in work/education
Alcoholism’s Effects on Marriage So your parent’s alcohol struggles can continue to affect you long after you leave the family home. Let’s look at how this specifically relates to marriage. Attachment is Impacted by Alcoholism As a young child, having alcoholic parents affects the attachment bond you have with your parent, which goes on to form a blueprint of all future relationships the child will have[iii].
Alcoholic parents often display erratic and inconsistent parenting, sometimes being loving and supportive, other times being absent, rejecting the child's needs or even being abusive. This leads to an "insecure" attachment style between parent and child, where the child deeply desires love and affection from their parent but doesn't always find it, leading them to believe they are not worthy of love and support from others.
This attachment style continues into adulthood and affects the ACOA's adult relationships, including marriage.
A much higher proportion of ACOA have insecure attachment styles as adults than in the normal population[iv]. Because their parents were so inconsistent, the ACOA has learned that they cannot rely on or trust the people they love the most. "As a result, COAs learn from an early age not to trust people and experience persistent fears of abandonment. Thus, although ACOAs may desire love and intimacy, they are likely to be afraid that relationships in their adult lives will be as hurtful as their early relationships[v]".
Reading that quote closely you can see the fear that is embedded into one’s belief system based on what you experienced as a child. It often creates insecure attachment.
Insecure attachment as an adult is strongly linked to marital problems, including[vi]:
Lower intimacy Increased conflict and poor conflict resolution skills Lower stability Less displays of emotion and vulnerability
Satisfaction with Marriage These issues are bound to affect the quality of the marriage. A study in 2008[vii] interviewed 634 newlywed couples for the first 4 years of their marriage. A link was found between parental alcoholism and marital satisfaction, but it was dependent on gender: husbands only reported lower marital satisfaction if their mother had been alcoholic, and wives only had lower satisfaction if their fathers had been alcoholic.
Here in North America we’ve become pretty conversant with ADHD as a culture. How it impacts kids at school, in the home, and so on. But it’s time to start the conversation around how ADHD impacts marriage. Did you know that your marriage can be a place that fosters a reduction in the problematic symptomatology of ADHD?
What is ADHD? Just in case this is a new term for you, ADHD is a mental health condition normally diagnosed in childhood.
ADHD impacts the brain’s executive functioning ability, so that people with ADHD show reduced decision making ability, attention control, impulse control and memory. Impairments to concentration, low impulse control and difficulty regulating your emotions can also lead to social and communication problems in people with ADHD[i].
Here are the specific diagnostic criteria from the DSM, which is the mental health handbook for diagnosing disorders.
Often fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes in schoolwork, work or other activities Often has difficulty sustaining attention in tasks or play activities Often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly Often does not follow through on instructions and fails to finish schoolwork, chores or duties in the workplace Often has difficulty organizing tasks and activities Often avoids, dislikes or is reluctant to engage in tasks that require sustained mental effort Often loses things necessary for tasks or activities Is often easily distracted by extraneous stimuli
About 3% of the adult population are diagnosed with ADHD. A further 16% show sub-clinical levels of ADHD: they have some of the symptoms but not enough to meet the criteria for diagnosis[ii]. Up until fairly recently ADHD was thought to only affect children, so there are likely a lot of adults with ADHD out there who are currently undiagnosed and therefore unable to work out why they think and act in a way that's so different to other people.
Everyone gets a bit distracted sometimes, or acts impulsive and disorganized. But if these are common features of your daily life and they significantly impact the way you function, it might be worth booking a discussion with a doctor or mental health professional just to see if ADHD has been affecting you without your knowledge. The fact that ADHD is undiagnosed in so many adults means that this is a potential factor in marital distress that may be unrecognized in many, many cases. How Does ADHD Affect Marriage? Common Challenges The symptoms of ADHD can create difficulties in marriage. Some of the more common challenges include[iii]:
Being forgetful and disorganized: failing to meet commitments or remember to do things Inattentiveness to your spouse's emotional state and needs Difficulty attending to or communicating effectively with your spouse Emotional overreactions: saying or doing things impulsively which hurt the marriage
Then there’s the whole issue of perception or interpretation by your spouse. Your spouse may come to see your ADHD inability to stick to commitments or remember agreed on actions as a sign that you don't care about the relationship.
Further, ADHD also impairs communication and listening skills, reducing intimacy and potentially leading to conflict. Marital Quality Sometimes these issues can impact the quality of a marriage, for either the spouse with ADHD or the other. A study in 2004[iv] compared couples where one spouse had ADHD to control couples where neither spouse had ADHD. They found that marital satisfaction was often lower for the spouse with ADHD than in control couples. But people married to someone with ADHD did not differ in marital quality to the control groups.
So having ADHD may decrease your own marital satisfaction but does not necessarily impact your spouse as much. "The ADHD adults’ perceptions of the health of their marriages and families were more negative than their spouses’ perceptions.[v]"
However,
If your husband is abusive it can be really, really difficult to get him into therapy for help. And yet, this leaves the wife in a very difficult place — not only because of the abuse — but because usually the burden of mending the relationship and the problems are placed on her. That’s part of the abusive dynamic. So how do you get past the control and manipulation?
How do you convince an abusive husband they need to get help? How do you approach them about the issue when any confrontation could get dangerous very quickly? The trick here is that in these kinds of situations the blame has been laid for too long at the feet of the abuse survivor. So it is really challenging to safely and effectively motivate the abuser to seek help.
Before we get into this, remember that our episodes should be considered a self-help tool and do not replace individual counseling or direct support from professionals, or even law enforcement in your area as may be required in a situation like this. If your situation is severe you should be pursuing emergency help and establishing safety before you consider trying to intervene on your spouse at all. Barriers to Confronting Abusive Husbands I want to start by acknowledging why it can be so hard to confront an abusive husband. I’m going to speak directly to wives in this situation but also want to acknowledge that there can be husbands out there too, and their wives are abusive, and this is also a very challenging and complex situation for you.
The first issue is the most obvious and that is that your physical safety could be at risk or even the safety of your children. In extreme cases your life may be at risk. If that’s your situation you need a safety and escape plan.
Another possibility is that the constant cycle of abuse in your marriage has worn you down to the point where your self-esteem is completely eroded. The humiliation, the lack of control and the isolation — those can lead to feelings of worthlessness and even that you should just accept the abuse since you won’t ever be able to make it stop[i].
Control is also an issue here. If there’s been isolation, or loss of identity, or fear of violence, or financial control or other kinds of restrictions it can make it very hard for you to take action.
Of course there is also the manipulative thinking imposed by abusers so that you may even believe the abuse is your own fault (Chang et al, 2006)
And then there’s trauma bonding. Abusive marriages often create a sense of dependency in you where your low self esteem and sense of powerlessness makes you feel that you need your abusive husband in order to survive[ii]. In this situation you may not confront your husband or try to convince him to get help for fear that he may leave. Or, you may have no power to actually convince him since he believes you will never actually leave him. This is really tough stuff.
Finally, hopelessness comes into play. Long-term abuse can lead to a tangible sense of powerlessness and hopelessness. Many abused wives experience symptoms of depression and mental illness. You may therefore believe that there is no hope that your situation will improve, and so make no effort to seek help. What Can You Do? There are a few options to consider here. Police Action In the case of physical abuse, police intervention can act as a strong deterrent and also provide motivation for future change.
A study in 1995[iii] looked at police intervention into domestic abuse, and found that being arrested and prosecuted after committing domestic violence significantly reduced the likelihood of future events. This is likely because after arrest, the abuser is often required to undergo mandatory therapy, court-ordered counseling or some other form of intervention[iv].
So as a way of getting your husband into treatment, police action is a drastic but effective strategy.
I get that this is a tough decision to make — it really exposes what is happening in your marriage to the public b...
Nagging is our subject for today. We’ve got some insights for you today! For example, did you know that there is a good reason why wives nag more than husbands? And that it is not actually because there’s something wrong with the wife? This is like mythbusters for marriage!
Nobody likes being nagged by their spouse. And no one likes having to nag their spouse over and over about something. But, as we’ll see today, there are often some real and honest reasons behind nagging, and getting to the root of them will definitely benefit your marriage. What is Nagging? Nagging is "pestering others with demands, pleas, and/or requests for compliance when they are not doing what we would like them to do[i]”
Typically, in order for something to be qualified as nagging it needs to have a negative effect on the target of the nagging too. It usually needs “to annoy by constant scolding, complaining or urging[ii]”.
So typically it is a persistent attempt to persuade or request something but it is not overtly aggressive in nature. Usually what happens is nagging is prompted when someone fails to comply with a request (there’s a hint for the myth busting part of this episode…we’ll get to that below), so the request is made again. Nagging in Marriage Within marriage, nagging is motivated by a desire for your spouse to change some aspect of themselves or their actions. So it is therefore different to complaining or simply venting emotions. Common topics for nagging within marriage include[iii]:
Household task completion Money Personal habits Appearance Health Children Amount of love/affection displayed Work or work/life balance Time spent together
So how does it actually work or what does it look like? A study in 2008[iv] describes the process of nagging, and why it can become common:
One spouse (the "initiator") makes a request for a specific action from their spouse The other spouse (the "responder") refuses the request, for whatever reason: perhaps they aren't motivated to do it, they weren't paying full attention to the request, the request wasn't worded clearly or the responder didn't agree that it needs doing. The initiator must now choose either to persist with the request or to abandon it. For the interaction to be considered nagging, the initiator would choose to persist in making the request The responder now chooses either to comply with the request or continue refusing Steps 3 and 4 continue until either the initiator gives up or the responder complies with the request
So you have this back and forth, perhaps over ten minutes or maybe over several days, of a request being met with a refusal. Sound familiar?
Nagging can become a common behavior because it is very likely that the responder will eventually succumb and do what the initiator is asking. They’ll do what is being asked just to shut their spouse up, in other words. If this happens then the initiator has been "rewarded" for nagging by getting what they want. So the behavior is reinforced: therefore they become more likely to use nagging in the future. In the mind of the initiator, more nagging=more likely to get what I want. Do Wives Nag More than Husbands? The general stereotype is that wives are more prone to nagging than husbands, and the majority of people believe this to be true. But what does the research say?
A study in 2006[v] tested whether this was actually the case and found that women are more likely to nag both men and other women, whereas men are more likely to only nag other men. So in the general population, nagging is equal between sexes, but within a marriage the wife is more likely to nag the husband than vice versa.
But, here’s the myth busting part where us guys kind of have to hang our heads and stop pointing the finger at our wives: a study in 2014[vi] found that in most marriages women are more likely to comply with a request the first time they are asked than men are.
Today we are going to unpack the virtue of admiration. By the way, did you know that admiration has a dark side? I had no idea until we tackled this subject too, but it does make a lot of sense!
If you’ve ever read the Song of Solomon in the Bible I think you have a pretty clear example there of how admiration is so helpful for fostering love and affection between lovers. What is Admiration? I imagine everyone knows what admiration is, generally. But actually describing it might be a little harder. Sometimes it can be hard to differentiate admiration from other similar positive emotions in marriage. Here’s a helpful quote from a study we reviewed: “Admiration is a feeling of delighted approval of the accomplishment or character of another person[i]”
A lot of the time admiration comes from pleasant surprises: when someone does something or shows characteristics that prompt feelings of fondness, awe, approval and respect[ii]. I think that we can also benefit from being intentional about admiration though, and seek to notice and focus on those attributes in others and in our spouse in particular.
But there are other emotions linked to admiration. These include[iii]:
Gratitude: thankfulness for someone's actions and who they are. Strongly linked to feelings of admiration and often naturally follows on from it. Both have positive effects for relationships Elevation: researchers describe this as a specific form of admiration felt in response to "witnessing an act of virtue or moral beauty". It’s like when you see your spouse do something especially incredible you “elevate” them in your mind. Envy: now this is the dark side of admiration, where instead of approving of the qualities of others, you feel bad about your lack of these qualities. Or you desire to take those qualities for yourself. Envy is desiring the good others have rather than just admiring them. You see, admiration is wholly focused on the other person, while envy is more introspective Joy: feelings of admiration are physically and psychologically similar to feeling joy. We often experience these together.
Admiration Impacts Marriage Stability and Satisfaction Here’s a neat, long-term study. Shapiro et al[iv] interviewed 43 newlywed couples and then observed them for 6 years of their marriage. They found that the key qualities which predicted a stable, happy marriage were:
Fondness and admiration expressed. Expressed is the keyword there: not just felt. Awareness of your spouse's needs and their world Amount of unity expressed through use of phrases including "we" and "us" rather than "I"
These factors were strongly linked to both marital satisfaction for husbands and wives, and marital stability. Using these factors they were able to predict stability/divorce 6 years later with 94% accuracy.
How fascinating is that? From one conversation the researchers could predict the trajectory of a marriage with almost total success. By the way — we worked really hard in designing our content for our marriage retreat on The Marriage Cruise for Smart Couples to build these three items up in the couples who attended. Buffering Fondness and admiration were also seen as a buffer which protected couples from the stress of major life events such as the birth of the first child.
This was especially true for husbands expressing admiration for their wives: "The fondness and admiration system in a couple's relationship can be thought of as the glue that holds the relationship together... The more fondness for his wife the husband expresses, or the more glue he puts into the relationship, the more satisfied the wife is with the marriage.[v]" (Shapiro et al, 2000) Inspiration Admiration for someone can inspire you to want to be a better person yourself. This kind of inspiration “involves the transcendence of the ordinary preoccupations or limitations of human agency[vi]”, meaning that admiring and being inspired by someone motivates you to push yours...
Can you remember what it was like to flirt with your spouse before you were together? The fun and excitement of figuring out you were into each other… don’t you wish you could bring that spice into your relationship now that you’ve been together for years? Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to look at today!
What is Flirting? Here’s a simple definition: flirting is any behavior with has the potential to be seen as sexual[i]. Actually I think that’s just a sexualized definition of flirting. I think flirting can be suggestive of romance without needing to lead to sex. I say that for the benefit of Christian singles and married folk alike.
Flirting is often more nonverbal than verbal: smiles, touch, eye contact and so on. It is often playful and ambiguous: you may not be quite sure if you’re being flirted with or not and that’s all part of the fun.
And let me just say, that while I don’t want to take flirting away from singles who are looking for a marriage partner, in this episode we are talking about a couple who are flirting between themselves.
Now it’s hard to imagine that researchers could investigate something like flirting without sucking all the fun out of it but one researcher noted that flirting is often used to achieve one of six main goals[ii]:
Sex motivation: flirting to initiate sex Relational motivation: flirting to increase intimacy in an existing relationship Exploring motivation: testing a potential marriage partner’s interest in a relationship (this one is definitely for the singles rather than the married couples!) Fun motivation: flirting simply to have fun Esteem motivation: flirting to increase your own self esteem Instrumental motivation: flirting to gain some form of reward from the other person.
Other than the exploring option, I think we can look at all of the others and say that flirtation in marriage can and should be a normal part of our interactions. It may look different than the flirting that happens outside of marriage, but between a husband and wife it can really just be a normal part of marital interaction and can really be used to reinforce the sense of togetherness in the marriage[iii].
One researcher actually noted that long-term marriages use a particular style of flirting called authentic flirting. It has one of those holographic stickers on the side. No, just kidding. No, this study in 2017[iv] suggests that authentic flirting is not aimed at having fun or experimenting or trying to get something from your spouse: it is simply an expression of love.
Here’s a quote: "Authentic flirting is defined as an affectionate, creative, or playful action for connecting emotionally and sexually with another person. The motive is to see and be seen lovingly by a partner through expressing spontaneously a combination of curiosity, play, humor, or flirting gestures for increased emotional intimacy.”
So let me just say on that point: just because your wife flirted with you doesn’t mean you need to expect anything in bed. If flirting in your books only exists as a signal that you are going to have sex tonight, you are actually missing out on a lot of other fun flirting. It is truly a very diverse and flavorful way of expressing love. Don’t make your wife afraid to flirt. Flirting and Marriage On that note, sometimes there are barriers to flirting in marriage. Barriers to Flirting in Marriage One of those barriers could be just what we mentioned: your spouse may want some flirting just to be for the joy of it. But you sexualize it every time. Leave some room for your spouse to be utterly exhausted and still feeling like throwing some flirt your way without creating expectations that he or she is going to be too tired to meet.
Another challenge that can come up is if the passionate love in our marriage declines over time. It is normal to experience a more stable, companionate love after the first 18 months of marriage but this doesn’t mean you have to lose the fire.
Sarcasm: it can be one cutting comment that is never forgotten. Or, an easy habit that becomes part of our normal day-to-day interaction as couples. Turns out there’s a lot more to it than just a bit of sass as we shall see.
Why Do We Use Sarcasm? There can be a lot of reasons why we resort to sarcasm but I think it is really good to pause and just peel back the layers on sarcasm. It turns out there’s some important but often very subtle underlying psychological things happening around this sarcasm issue.
Sometimes we use sarcasm to communicate complaints or criticism. We actually do this with the intent to come across in a less hostile way because we are couching our negativity in a touch of humor. Perhaps we feel it makes us appear less rude or less unfair when making a complaint about the person receiving the criticism[i].
In that way, sarcasm can be about me trying to save face while still extending the criticism or complaint in a more superficially polite way.
Other times sarcasm can be used on the other end of that: as a way to respond to criticism. We can dismiss someone’s feedback or argue against them while still appearing calm.
Sometimes it is just about finding a way to express annoyance in a way that is more socially acceptable than outright rage. When you make a cutting remark your peers may laugh and think you funny rather than be disappointed when you lose your temper.
Another interesting way we use sarcasm is for conflict resolution: sometimes we defuse a situation or de-escalate conflict by using sarcasm. Of course, since it has an edge to it, this does not always work.
When you pause and survey these possibilities, one theme that does emerge is that sarcasm is often about finding a way to express negative emotion in a less vulnerable, less directly-critical way. There is a sense in which it can be a little more polite because it is more indirect. In sarcasm, the actual negative intent is left for the listener to interpret. There’s also a relational component because in using sarcasm in this way we also create a sense of distance between ourselves and the recipient.
So you may think your sarcastic comments are just intended to be funny, but if you step back are they serving another, less wholesome purpose? Sarcastic Communication in Marriage Let’s examine the behavior more specifically. Sarcasm is often misinterpreted and can be easy to miss, so let’s run down the common characteristics of this form of speech. Characteristics of Sarcastic Speech
Exaggerated tone of voice OR blank, monotone voice Blank expression Raised eyebrows Rolling eyes Exaggerated fake smile or smirk False sympathy (“wow, that must have been soooo hard for youuuu”) Expressing the opposite emotion of what your words are saying (“I’m so glad you did that”)[ii]
What Does Sarcasm Convey in Marriage? How does sarcasm work in an intimate relationship like marriage? In marriage, sarcasm is most often an expression of contempt[iii]. Contempt in marriage is very dangerous to the longevity of the marriage.
In this context, it often takes the form of expressing superiority or showing a lack of respect (looking down your nose at your spouse) and often has a distant or icy quality to it. Because sarcasm falls under the domain of contempt, it is also a reliable predictor of divorce in a marriage. That’s why we really want you to pause and think about this one if it is part of how you guys interact.
Other researchers see sarcasm as a form of rejection or as defensiveness—because it dismisses or undermines your spouse and what he or she is saying[iv]. Again, this is a distancing effect. Perception of Sarcasm As we mentioned earlier, sarcasm is often used to express negative emotions in a more polite, calm way. This makes the sarcastic comment seem less offensive and hurtful to the person saying it[v]. Note that the perceived benefit is only a perception in the mind of the person saying the sarcasm.
Ogling or objectifying the bodies of others by staring with obvious sexual interest can be an easy habit to get into. Especially in a culture that objectifies women. It’s also something that recovering porn addicts have to work really hard at to break. But: there are plenty of non-addicts that deal with this too, so let’s break this down and figure out how to break free of this habit.
I think the first thing I want to note here is that while this activity or habit of checking people out can become almost mundane and very normal for a person, we have to realize it really is a betrayal event for our spouses. So it can be generating a lot of ongoing pain and hurt for one person while the other person is like “What? I was hardly even looking!” Why Do Men Ogle? Why is this such a common problem? The short answer is that our culture socializes us to look at women this way. In fact, both men and women are socialized to see women as objects to be viewed and admired[i].
Don’t believe me? Just look on Instagram…if a man or woman posts a photo of him/herself posing — it gets a ton of comments. Even though this is seen as a positive when it’s women complimenting each other…it is still objectifying. Men are taught to look at women in this way, and women are taught to think of and display themselves accordingly.
This socialization happens through advertising, films, television and all the media that almost exclusively portrays women with ideal body shapes. And they emphasize their physical appearance over their personalities and qualities as a person.
The effect of this is that men are trained to view women as sexual objects. In that context, ogling and “checking out” women becomes acceptable. We say things like “I was just looking!” to minimize and defend the behavior. And then the fact that so many people buy into this worldview is also used as a defense — as if you aren’t personally making a choice to check out other women, you’re just conforming to how everyone else acts.
But just because something is commonplace, that doesn’t in any way mean it isn’t harmful. This objectifying of women has a dehumanizing effect. A rather alarming study from 2014[ii] found that when thinking about women in terms of their physical appearance, men would use less human words to describe them, and assign fewer human traits to them than they would to men. This effect can even be seen at the neurological level: focusing on women's bodies activates the same brain areas that are activated when looking at inanimate objects[iii].
How frightening is that? Men looking at women think of them as less human. Of course, you can only imagine the moral challenges this brings because we hold a different moral standard for what we do to an object versus what we would do to a human being. The Effect of Ogling on Women A common defense made is that nobody is being hurt. We are “only looking”. But the research shows that objectifying gaze has tangible, negative effects on the target of the gaze. Even the perception that one might be the target of objectification can have a negative effect. These effects include[iv]:
Increased body shame and dissatisfaction with your own appearance Increased body surveillance — monitoring and worrying about your own appearance Internalizing the beauty standards of society and trying to live up to them Increased belief that looks are all that matter Reduced concentration, cognitive ability and performance (e.g., at work or in sports) Increased “self objectification” by women: thinking of themselves in more objectifying terms and being constantly preoccupied with how others will see you Acting less individually and more in line with expectations. For example, talking less and not standing up for yourself[v]
What is really sad is that you begin to get the picture that as you objectify people they begin to internalize that view, and begin to believe this about themselves as well.
Balancing work and family can be a tricky task for any marriage. In fact, sometimes it can seem like it’s impossible to really satisfy either area: either work is going to be unhappy if you put too much emphasis on family, or family is going to be unhappy if there’s too much emphasis on work.
Or: both will be unhappy! This is really hard to figure out!
Work-Family Conflict Work and family are probably the two biggest demands on your time and energy. When both your career and your family responsibilities are competing for the same hours in the day it can easily lead to conflict in one area or the other.
Work life and home life run into issues usually in one of two ways:
When the demands of work interfere with your ability to manage family life, or When the demands of marriage and family life interfere with the ability to manage work
This can go two ways and consequently there are different causes, different consequences and ways of coping[i]. If you pay attention, what you will usually notice is that stress is caused in one area and then most prominently felt in the opposite area: for example, stress caused at work is felt most strongly in the marriage, and vice versa[ii].
This can be hard for your marriage because you have something outside the marriage that’s bringing stress in. Also, just to be clear, this can happen in dual-income families or it can happen in single-income families: all you need is a demanding or successful job, some long hours or a lot of travel. Competing Roles It is good to be compassionate with ourselves here because having a career and being a spouse/parent are two very different roles to hold simultaneously. On top of that, these two roles can compete for the same time and emotional energy[iii].
When that happens there are two processes that can cause conflict between these roles:
Spillover: where stress and difficulties in one role spill over into the other (e.g., stress at work leading to conflict at home) Congruence: where there is a separate factor affecting both home and work equally (e.g., poor conflict resolution skills)
Basically you can either bring stress from one role into the other, or you can bring some other factor with you that’s causing stress in both roles. A tight deadline at work creates stress at home, but a bad attitude creates stress everywhere you go. Not Enough Resources What happens is we all have a limited amount of resources such as energy, time, money, knowledge, emotional effort etc. When you do not have enough resources to take care of all the roles this creates tension. Or maybe you have to use an excessive amount of resources trying to balance the roles[iv]. Think about it: is this happening to you? Are you stretching yourself too thin?
Further, work-family conflict can also occur when behavior resources are carried over from one role to another inappropriately. For example: someone who is stressed at work may try to use the same authoritarian management style at home. That’s never going to go well. Then you get conflict in the home[v].
These are all dynamics that we need to be aware of in order to solve work-family conflict.
So is Work the Problem? Or Family?
High demands at home naturally pull your resources away from work, and conflict at home reduces your capacity to handle conflict at work[vi].
Here is a helpful way of figuring out where the stress is and what the impact is:
Factors Consequences
Work Interfering with Family
Stressful or high pressure working conditions Conflict with colleagues at work Long hours and physically/emotionally tiring work Inflexible working hours Having to do work you don't find meaningful or engaging
Dissatisfaction with family life Marital tension, leading to conflict Higher overall life stress Symptoms of depression and anxiety Reduced physical health- such as high blood pressure, sleep disturbances and increased susceptibility to illness
Loyalty is the second strongest predictor of a long term, stable marriage. In other words, this is one of the most important features of creating a thriving, passionate marriage. We’ll see what the most important predictor is a bit later, but today we are going to focus in on why loyalty is so powerful and how to create more of it in your marriage — especially in areas that we commonly get derailed.
What Does Loyalty in Marriage Look Like? What do you think about when you consider the idea of loyalty in marriage?
Turns out that loyalty is more than just staying faithful to your spouse.
Fletcher[i] gave a very helpful differentiation between minimum loyalty and maximum loyalty. Minimum loyalty is simply not betraying your spouse: not having affairs, not betraying trust, and not being dishonest. It’s the bare minimum: the baseline.
Maximum loyalty is “becoming one” with your spouse through long-term commitment, partnership and devotion. You can see that minimum is about what you do not do — the major taboos of marriage. But maximum is about investing into and pouring yourself into something very deeply.
Maximum loyalty is achieved through a sense of companionship and partnership based on[ii]:
A shared vision for life: wanting the same things from life, valuing the same qualities and agreeing on important life issues. Joint life goals: having goals which matter to both of you which you can work towards, such as parenting, community or charity work, spiritual practice, joint business ventures and so on. Generosity: investing in your spouse through affection, time, gifts, acts of service etc Fairness: sharing workloads and taking joint responsibility for the relationship Openness, vulnerability and honesty
So it turns out there is a lot to this whole subject of loyalty, right?
The other beautiful aspect of loyalty in marriage is not only the commitment to the covenant of marriage, but to the personal growth that comes from marriage. You see, loyalty also implies that I am willing to improve my own character and to bring more of myself to the marriage and allow myself to be challenged to grow and develop as a person.
This brings a “richness and vitality that may be dormant” in the marriage[iii]. So loyalty is something developed both intra-personally (within myself) and inter-personally (between ourselves). Benefits of Loyalty in Marriage A loyal marriage is a strong marriage. Let’s go through some of the many benefits loyalty can bring to you and your spouse. Satisfaction Loyalty is an important mediating factor between the actions and interactions in a marriage. It also impacts the overall levels of happiness and satisfaction.
According to a study in 2004[iv], actions and behaviors such as displays of affection, agreement, intimacy and sex only positively influence marital satisfaction if love and loyalty are there as mediators. So doing these positive actions in marriage doesn't necessarily lead to a happy marriage unless the underlying characteristics of love and loyalty are there.
This reality echoes the teaching of 1 Corinthians 13 — the most well known chapter on love in the Bible. That chapter profoundly underscores the reality that you can do all sorts of wonderful things but unless you are doing them in love, the actions really are meaningless. So this is a really good self-check to ask: yeah, I may be checking all the good husband boxes or all the good wife boxes, but is it really clear that these things I’m doing are saturated with love and loyalty?
So loyalty is the hidden link between all these good actions and real satisfaction. Now, loyalty can also lead to marital satisfaction directly. For couples who value loyalty and see devotion to each other as a priority in marriage, being happy with the loyalty displayed by your spouse is enough to create high marital satisfaction independent of any other factors[v]. This is also a great point from the research because it means we need to be ...
I do not think that there is a human being on the face of our planet right now who does not struggle at least a little bit with defensives. Some of us struggle a lot. And defensiveness in marriage is definitely going to make you unhappy and dissatisfied with your marriage. Turns out, it’s not an easy one to overcome either—but today we’re going to show you how.
This week we are gonna call you out and expose this gremlin running around in all our marriages called Defensiveness.
I know what you’re thinking…”I’m not defensive!!” But, that’s the problem right there. How Defensiveness Works The Bible says that "A brother offended is more unyielding than a strong city, and quarreling is like the bars of a castle.” (Proverbs 18:19 ESV) Or we could say a “Wife offended” or “Husband offended”… Once you hit that point where there’s an attack, there’s a known flaw, there’s known issues then it is really easy to become defensive.
So we have some cool stuff to start with because we are really going to break down this defensiveness thing — you have to know the enemy in order to defeat it — and the enemy is not your spouse, the enemy is the defensiveness that happens between you.
Defensiveness happens when four things line up[i]. What I really like about this is that if you take any of these out, you begin to undermine defensiveness in your own life. So the four things are:
A self-perceived flaw which you refuses to admit Sensitivity to that flaw (e.g., you are embarrassed or even ashamed about it) An attack by another person (doesn’t have to be a huge attack — could just be a blunt observation) The attacker seeing the same flaw which the defender does not want to admit
Defensiveness Could Be a Personality Trait The first two items above are more characteristic issues: they enter into that area of ways of thinking and/or personality traits. I have a flaw — I do not want to admit to it — and I am sensitive about it. That’s getting into that character realm of things.
Often we might feel quite inadequate around a flaw or at least insecure about it. We certainly do not want to admit it to others and we may not even really admit it to ourselves.
In order to become defensive, that real or perceived flaw has to relate to something that is an important part of my own sense of self or self-worth, and my identity[ii]. It’s like a closely guarded secret that you’re trying your hardest to hide from everyone— maybe even yourself— so when it’s brought to light you instantly try to shoot it down.
So we get defensive in situations in which our identity is threatened.
A classic example is an addiction — even take it on the lighter end of the scale, like a phone addiction. For me to be defensive, go through the four parts:
I perceive it but do not want to admit to it I am sensitive — I do not want it pointed out You point it out to me with a harsh edge on your voice because it is a problem that is coming between us You see the flaw, and I know that.
And then I am beginning to think, I am an addict. I am a bad husband. Good husbands do not have this problem. I stake a lot of my self-identity on being a good husband and father.
Now we have all the ingredients for defensiveness. So how does this get talked (or fought!) through in a marriage? Defensive Communication in Marriage There are two sides to defensive communication: the defensive reaction, and the action which caused it. We need to separate these. Just think carefully about how you either trigger defensiveness in your spouse, or how you respond to your spouse when you are feeling defensive[iii]. Let’s start with the first. How to Trigger Defensiveness In Your Spouse Here are some sure-fire ways to put your spouse into a defensive mindset:
Use words or tone of voice that evaluates or judges the listener (“I see you are on your phone…again”) Attempt to control or coerce the listener (“If you don’t put that down I am going to freak on you.”)
Resentment is what happens when you are treated unfairly and you begin to feel angry and bitter. Resentment can be directed at your spouse, at God, at your life: but if it begins to play a significant role in your marriage, that’s going to make home a pretty tough place to be.
Proverbs 12:25 says that anxiety makes the heart heavy and as I thought about the subject of resentment it occurred to me that resentment can be a form of anxiety. You don’t see this in any diagnostic manual, but it has the same ruminating characteristic of repeatedly mulling over past grievances, with a lot of negativity.
We all end up with resentment at different places and times in our marriage. We don’t want to be getting after you about it, but rather we want to help you understand how it happens, why it doesn’t help and what to do differently!
Resentment often strikes us when we feel that we have been treated badly. Especially if it’s in a way we did not deserve, but it can even happen when good things happen to others which you feel they did not earn[i]. That starts to look a lot like envy.
In marriage it often occurs when you feel you have been unfairly wronged and so it might bring about a desire to get even by holding onto a grudge and remaining bitter[ii]. Major Sources of Resentment in Marriage Unresolved Conflict If you struggle with poor conflict resolution and a fairly frequent inability to solve disagreements this often leads to a buildup of resentment and anger[iii]. You get this buildup of annoyances and hurts which might be individually small but if left unforgiven and unaddressed can start to look pretty big. This slowly building resentment then negatively impacts marital satisfaction for both partners.
It is also helpful to note that certain styles of conflict are specifically linked to creating high levels of resentment, especially the competitive style of conflict where each spouse is trying to "win" the argument rather than reach a joint solution[iv].
Unless arguments are properly resolved and forgiven, resentment at the initial transgression which caused the argument will continue to impact the marriage. I often tell the couples I am providing counseling to that how much you argue is not nearly as important as if you resolve those arguments.
Underlying resentment about past grievances can then fuel future conflict and impede conflict resolution in the future, creating a negative spiral[v]. If you’re still angry about something from last week then this week’s annoyance is going to seem even more infuriating. And then when you’re arguing you start to throw in all the little things from the last few days that have annoyed you, and the whole thing blows up.
Don’t worry, we’re going to show you what to do about all this in just a moment! Perceived Unfairness Believing that your spouse is acting unfairly often leads to feelings of resentment which can create conflict and reduce marital satisfaction. This can occur over all kinds of aspects of life, such as:
Division of household labor: believing that you do more work than your spouse or that the work is split unfairly leads to resentment, especially for wives[vi]. Emotion work: similarly, feeling that you are doing all the emotional work to maintain the relationship (you’re the one doing all the maintenance behaviors like expressing love, confiding and intimacy etc) or feeling like you put more work into the emotional side of the marriage than your spouse does can also create resentment[vii]. Secrecy: feeling that information is being kept from you by your spouse can also lead to resentment[viii]. Lack of perceived support: feeling unsupported and thinking that your spouse is not helping you through difficulties also leads to hurt and resentment. For example a study in 2000[ix] examined marital satisfaction in couples where one spouse had a serious illness and found that a lack of support and concern or a refusal to help led to feelings of resentment which r...
Today we want to lift the hood on the world of marriage counseling and look at one particular approach and how it works. If you’ve ever been curious about what happens in the counseling room or are considering counseling there’s a lot more to it than you might think!
The Mystery of Marriage Counseling The world of counseling may seem like a mysterious or even intimidating place to those who know little about it. There’s a stigma around mental health itself, and although a distressed marriage is not a mental health problem, we rarely talk about our struggles as a couple. We like to appear like we have it all together and I think us church-going folk are even more prone to this.
But then you do hear the horror stories when things don’t go well and people open up. Some terrible advice comes from people who call themselves counselors.
So then when it comes to choosing a marriage counselor it can be pretty scary because your marriage is a big deal and you don’t want to the wrong person trying to help you with it! Basic Marriage Counselor Criteria Now I want to say that this article is not an extended advertisement for our services, but the things I am going to tell you are important facts you need to know, whether you decide to work with someone from my counseling practice or find a local counselor.
The first thing is that not all counseling degrees are created equal. When a person is earning their Master’s degree in order to become a therapist, their school and the degree program they choose will generally orient itself around a particular school of thought.
Of course, there are a plethora of flavors. But when it comes to marriage counseling you should know that there are a number of universities around North America that offer marriage and family therapy programs specifically. These kinds of degrees have less focus on specific mental health problems like anxiety disorders or even addictions, and they focus very much on relationships, how humans interact, how children learn to love and relate to others, on marriage dynamics and on family systems.
So when you choose a therapist the first thing you should filter on is their education: do they have a degree that specializes in marriage and family? And usually you’ll see this in the letters after their last name in that either their degree will look like MAMFT (Master of Arts in Marriage and Family Therapy) or their certifying body will supply MFT credentials like LMFT (Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist). If you’re not sure, ask about the person’s training.
The second thing you want to look for is whether the therapist has a specific approach to marriage counseling that is evidence-based. “Evidence-based” means that they are using a treatment approach which has been tested and tried through research and peer-reviewed journals.
Surprisingly, there are only a handful of marriage approaches that have been rigorously tested in this way, and so if you want to give you marriage the best chance of success you would do well to ensure you are selecting a counselor who uses an evidence based approach. Otherwise you’ll have no idea whether what you’re being told actually works or not.
Probably the two most popular evidence-based counseling approaches are Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (sometimes called EFT or EFCT) and the Gottman Method. I have taken specific training in both of these, on top of my MFT degree, as has my colleague in my practice, Jesse Schellenberg. They are quite different but very complementary.
Both of us favor EFCT as our preferred approach: about 90% of couples show significant improvements using this approach and we’ll talk more about success rates in a moment, but 90% is incredible.
How EFCT Works Key Principles Now, I am going to work hard to break the scientific jargon and psychobabble into English here but there are some key principles in this approach to marriage counseling that are important (Gurman et al, 2015[i])
I am excited about this episode today. We all dread mental health issues but today you’ll find out that there is a lot of hope for marriages where one spouse has significant mental health problems.
Mental health is a huge problem that affects millions of people around the world. Disorders including depression, anxiety, bipolar and others impact many more people than you may think and can cause real pain and distress.
Living with a long term mental illness is hard, and so is being married to someone with such a disorder. So today we want to look at the reality of how mental health impacts marriages, and what you can do to support your spouse if you are in this situation. How Mental Illness Impacts Marriage We need to be realistic about the impact of mental illness on marriage. Mental illness in one spouse often has a negative impact on wellbeing and marital satisfaction for both the mentally ill spouse and the other[i]. This is normally stronger for the mentally ill spouse but both spouses to feel the effects.
What we’d like to share with you is that for both the ill spouse and the healthy spouse, there are specific mediating factors which can account for much of the marital distress, and therefore be used to help keep marital satisfaction high even when dealing with severe mental issues like mood disorders, anxiety disorders and substance abuse disorders. Attributions Mental health disorders (especially mood disorders like depression or bipolar) affect how you interpret your spouse's actions and what you attribute them to[ii]. This attribution effect is important to be aware of.
Mental health disorders cause people to attribute their spouse's actions more negatively. They can also cause people to attribute negative behaviors to being stable parts of their spouse's personality rather than being isolated one-off incidents. This tendency to attribute things negatively leads to lower marital satisfaction over time. Levels of depression themselves do not lead to lower marital satisfaction: all the changes are due to this attribution issue[iii].
Remember our recent episode on attribution and misinterpretations in marriage? We talked about how the way you interpret your spouse’s actions can either set you on an upward or a downward spiral. Mental illness can, if you aren’t careful, make you more likely to see everything as negative, which then alters the way you act and feel. So we really have to watch the attribution piece and thoughtfully counteract that. Negative Thoughts and Views People with mental illness will hold more negative views about themselves, and about their marriage. Mental illness can affect perception so that the mentally ill spouse pays more attention to negative events and disregards the good things that happen. Mental illness can also cause people to have more negative expectations about the future[iv]. All these negative beliefs and expectations can influence the way people act and cause them to withdraw and hide away. Interpersonal Difficulties Anxiety, depression and personality disorders can all lead to impaired social skills,[v] such as expressing more negative views, difficulty expressing emotion, reduced problem-solving ability, a high need for reassurance and difficulty accepting and believing the reassurances offered.
The cycle of repeatedly asking for reassurance or seeking comfort and the refusal or inability to accept comfort can eventually lead to rejection.
These issues can create interpersonal problems within marriage over time as the non-ill spouse has to constantly reassure and comfort their mentally ill partner without getting as much support in return. Also without getting appreciation for the effort required to support the ill spouse.
To help with this, training in communication and social skills can lead to improvements in symptoms of mental illness, and improve marital functioning at the same time[vi]. Once again the point here is that it isn’t the mental illness itself that’s ...
When you become aware and appreciative of that which is valuable and meaningful, that is called gratitude. Gratitude needs to be expressed, and what we notice in our marriage is that we tend to experience it more than we express it. So we thought we should think more about that.
Gratitude is a powerful thing. Being mindful of all the good things in your life can change your whole outlook and make you a happier, more contented person. This is especially true in your marriage. It might not always be easy to be thankful for your spouse and your marriage, but if your marriage is struggling them making gratitude a part of your daily thinking can really turn things around. Benefits of Gratitude Research finds that expressions of gratitude have positive effects on marital satisfaction[i] . This works as both a long term way of building satisfaction over time, and also as a "booster shot" where gratitude produces short term increases in satisfaction[ii].
You probably already knew this: gratitude is good for your marriage. Let’s unpack how and why it helps, and then look at ways to increase the amount of gratitude we all show to our spouses. Gratitude and Relationship Strength A study in 2010[iii] surveyed 137 couples for how often they expressed gratitude to their spouse. In a follow up study they asked spouses to express gratitude to each other, with a control condition of thinking grateful thoughts without expressing them.
In both studies they found that expressing gratitude increased the expresser's perception of the "communal strength" of the relationship. Regularly expressing gratitude increased this sense of joint strength and commitment over time. Expressions of gratitude towards your partner are also linked to more positive perceptions of them[iv].
This was specifically true for the expresser of gratitude, not the person receiving it. So if you are unhappy because of the lack of gratitude you may actually need to try expressing it more rather than requesting it more!
The other crucial point is that the effect was only found for expressing gratitude, not just thinking it. So being grateful for your spouse is not enough to benefit from this increased relationship strength: you have to express it. Commitment and Reciprocity Now there is a reciprocal component to gratitude.
Expressions of gratitude towards your spouse leads to them feeling appreciated and valued. Feeling appreciated then leads to them appreciating you more.
So expressing gratitude strengthens the relationship for both the expresser and the receiver of gratitude. Increased appreciation leads spouses to be more sensitive to each other's needs and over time leads to higher levels of commitment[v]. The simple act of giving voice to the things you value about your spouse brings you closer together and helps you see each other in a better light.
Gratitude also helps couples grow closer together and become better at responding to each other's needs. Expressing gratitude for actions that really matter to you, or things that show that your spouse has been especially thoughtful helps to solidify those actions and helps your spouse to notice that their actions were appreciated. Put simply: if you say you like something your spouse did, they are more likely to do it again!
Expressing gratitude therefore creates and "upward spiral" where positive actions are reinforced and both spouses end up feeling closer together[vi]. You both end up benefiting.
This is what we have talked about before when we encourage you to reinforce what you want more of. That positive cycle or upward spiral is a powerful force for good in your marriage. Interpretations Another study in 2009[vii] surveyed 166 people and found a link between trait gratitude (being a grateful person generally) and a sense of “coherence”: the belief that life is meaningful and that you are able to cope with it. Being a grateful person helps you see life as having value and meaning.
We all carry at least a little narcissism in our hearts. We all show a few traits that belie underlying pride and entitlement. But what happens in marriages when narcissism is a defining feature? And how can spouses of narcissists learn best to cope with this issue?
Ok let’s get into the topic of narcissism — which, actually, can be one that feels pretty hopeless. But this is the first time I’ve really examined how to work with a narcissistic spouse and I am glad that there is hope. It can be very difficult to live with narcissism and no doubt some of our listeners today feel the reality of this: but there is hope.
What Does Narcissism Look Like? Narcissism either comes as a personality trait or traits — when we look at those you’ll probably notice that we all exhibit some of these characteristics at least on an occasional basis. For example, showing a sense of entitlement in your marriage — like you deserve to have something done for you by your spouse — but this does not necessarily mean that you have Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or NPD. NPD is a whole level above narcissistic traits. So let’s look at these traits vs. having a diagnosed personality disorder. Narcissistic Traits Narcissism as a personality trait is defined as:
Belief in one's own superiority A sense of entitlement and a need for admiration from others Displays of dominant, controlling or manipulative behavior and a disregard for the needs of others
So generally seeing yourself as above other people is the central issue. Narcissism does not always produce a universal sense of superiority but leads to narcissists thinking they are better in certain areas which they value. They may value their looks, success, wealth or some other form of ability but overlook areas where they might be considered lacking.
Narcissists are often prone to extreme jealousy and have very fragile self esteem as their sense of worth is directly tied to their ability to feel and be seen as superior to others[i]. As soon as that superiority is threatened their sense of who they are starts to fall apart.
Now just remember that any time we talk about abnormal psychology that it’s easy for any one of us to freak out and think — “Wow! That is me! I am so messed up!!” Especially for something like this.
If you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, as Verlynda and I are, and you understand that the Bible talks a lot about pride and you see the pride that exists in your life as I see the pride in mine, it can be easy to go from thinking we have the normal set of pride issues that come with our broken humanity to thinking that wow, maybe I have a huge personality problem.
Stay calm. Think this through. Talk to the people who know you best and who will be honest with you.
Take, for example, beliefs in one’s own superiority. Here’s a good example - I’m the guy who tries to nail the best parking spots when I go to the store. As close to the door as I can. I don’t park in any handicap spots — don’t worry! But when I nail an awesome parking spot there’s some major gloating that happens! But just because I do a few things like that, which involve the belief in one’s own superiority (“who’s the mac daddy for parking spots??”) or a sense of entitlement (“I deserve an awesome paring spot”) it does not mean I am a narcissist. Narcissistic Personality Disorder I think all of us display narcissistic behaviors from time to time.
A much smaller subset of the population would exhibit regular narcissistic traits or have narcissism as a more central part of their personality. That would make that person more challenging to be married to.
NPD on the other hand is the most severe situation. This disorder affects about 8% of men and 5% of women. The DSM definition of NPD includes:
Pathological personality traits such as antagonism, grandiosity, and attention seeking Impaired individual functioning due to unreasonably high standards and the need for approval from others in order to...
Merry Christmas!! Or, at least, that’s the way it is supposed to be. But does it always work out that way? Read on and we’ll tell you why it might — or it might not!
Christmas is a time for coming together as a family and celebrating. Right? While lots of people probably have very merry Christmases, many will also find the holiday season stressful and difficult. Having a merry Christmas as a couple doesn’t happen automatically— you have to be aware of a few things and work together at it. Do Most People Have a Happy Christmas? Turns out that 75% of people are generally satisfied with their Christmas experience[i]. I don’t know if it’s the skeptic in me but I wonder if that is overstated. Perhaps the data was collected by a guy in a green suit.
Less than 10% of people report significant levels of anger and sadness. That’s good to hear. And about half of people report some level of stress during Christmas.
Not too bad. But there’s some pretty interesting facts to learn as we go through this that are good to think about as we come up to this holiday.
A study in 2002[ii] interviewed 117 individuals to determine the specific factors that contributed to making Christmas holidays stressful or enjoyable. Here’s what they found:
Emphasizing family and spending time together was linked to greater happiness Emphasizing religious beliefs was linked to greater happiness Lower happiness and greater stress was reported when spending money and receiving gifts were the most important aspect of the holiday. Giving gifts and consuming in a way that was environmentally friendly was linked to higher happiness Men generally reported being happier and less stressed at Christmas than women- possibly because much of the responsibility for the shopping/cooking Christmas dinner etc falls to the woman.
This quote sums up their findings nicely: "In sum, the materialistic aspects of modern Christmas celebrations may undermine well-being, while family and spiritual activities may help people to feel more satisfied[iii]" Christmas Gifts Obviously this is starting to highlight what we already know: that gifts and materialistic expressions should not be the main focus of Christmas.
But what is really interesting is if you try to limit the amount of money you spend and you limit your gift giving, this is also linked to lower happiness over Christmas[iv]. In fact, another study in 2008[v] found that spending a higher proportion of your income on others than yourself predicted higher levels of happiness.
This, of course, gives evidence to the truth claim of Scripture that it is more blessed to give than receive (Acts 20:35).
So it shouldn’t be the main focus of the season, but gift giving can be a great way to show love and have fun together. Gift giving should be[vi]:
An expression of love Valuable- not necessarily in terms of cost but in the thought and effort that went into the gift Altruistic and not focussed on obligation or creating a feeling on indebtedness in the receiver Ideally contain some symbolic meaning, such as giving someone a gift to indicate that they are part of the family or giving a gift that will have special meaning to the receiver Tailored to who the receiver is, not based on your own preferences. So no giving your wife a gift that you secretly want for yourself!
How does the present buying process break down in a typical marriage? Women normally spend more time on gift shopping than men and often take overall responsibility for the first buying process, seeing it as "work". Men often take less of an active role in this and feel the need to buy presents for fewer people or see it as "woman's work"[vii].
So husbands, you could definitely make the holiday season less stressful for your wives by being more willing to be involved in the gift buying, by starting buying gifts earlier (rather than leaving it till Christmas eve!) and by getting gifts for more people rather than just close family.
Today is a difficult episode about the hardcore realities of the pornography industry. How is this marriage related? Well, pornography is a leading cause of divorce nowadays and one of the myths that we need to debunk as we fight this cancer is that viewing porn is a victimless activity.
Around 1/2 of marriages have at least one pornography-using spouse. Objectification is a big part of using porn: seeing the actors as sex objects. We’ve looked before at how watching porn impacts your marriage, but there’s another side to it too. Some people may watch porn thinking that it’s harmless fun, made by willing actors having the time of their lives. So I want to convey something of the human cost of the real people involved in creating pornography so that we all understand that viewing porn is not a victimless or harmless activity. Quite the opposite.
Human Trafficking and Abuse So you need to know that pornography relies on trafficked victims to create its content[i]. In fact, major centers for human trafficking such as St. Petersburg in Russia and Budapest in Hungary are also large producers of pornography. Many women that are trafficked for prostitution in these circumstances are also forced to make porn.
Even what you may consider ‘legit’ or at least, legal jobs like porn acting, modeling or stripping in clubs can also be an entrance point into the sex industry. Women that start in these roles are often pressured or forced into prostitution or other illegal activities[ii].
Research and first-hand accounts show that in the sex industry, control, intimidation and violence are commonplace. Around 71% of women in the sex industry are not "free to leave" the industry, either due to being physically withheld or trafficked, or else unfree to leave until they have paid off debts[iii].
50% of American women in the industry reported regular or daily violence from their agents, handlers or pimps and 90% reported verbal abuse.
Pornography is also sometimes used as a means of control: threatening to expose the pornographic videos they have made was a way of keeping women in the sex industry[iv]. In other instances women were totally unaware their pictures were being spread in magazines or online.
The picture research paints is that once you’re in this world of sex and porn, whether you entered it willingly or not, getting out of it again is difficult and dangerous. And once you’re involved many men and women find themselves forced into situations and acts they would never have agreed to. They find control slipping away from them and into the hands of people who would exploit them for all they’re worth. And you, the viewer, have no idea what circumstances the videos you are watching were made under. Sexually Transmitted Diseases STDs are a major problem among porn actors, and one of the main concerns actors report about their work[v].
In the US porn industry Chlamydia rates are 14.3% (compared to between 0.6% and 3% for the general population) and gonorrhea rates are 5.1% (compared to less than 0.1% in the general population)[vi]. Reinfection rates within a year are 26.1%[vii]. Other STDs are not routinely screened for so prevalence rates are unknown.
HIV can also be spread within the porn industry due to the high number of sexual partners actors are required to have and given that safe sex using condoms is rarely practiced. For example there was an outbreak in Los Angeles among porn actors in 2004, where 65 men and women were infected with HIV in a single month. Screening processes used in the industry failed to stop the disease spreading[viii].
Safety standards in the industry are poor and often violate health and safety regulations. For example actors are required to pay for their own screening tests and made to sign a waiver releasing their employer from responsibility if they contract HIV or an STD[ix]. Safe sex using condoms is uncommon, and risky or extreme sexual acts are treated as commonplace.
Families involving stepparents and step children are always tricky. And yet they’re a very common kind of family unit in today’s society. So how do the marriages look in these blended families? As we look into this we’ll see that a happy marriage and a happy blended family are very closely linked. How Common are Blended Marriages? Over half of marriages every year are second marriages for one or both spouses, and 65% of those are bringing kids from the previous relationship[i].
80% of blended families feature the biological mother and a step-father, rather than featuring a step-mother, or being "complex stepfamilies" where both spouses bring children from a prior relationship.
Let’s look at some of the common issues and challenges that couples in these families face. Forming a blended family or stepfamily presents challenges to the marriage, including:
Negotiating parenting roles The stepparent forming a new relationship with the child The divorced parent still having some control/responsibility for the children's upbringing, affecting the decision-making process for the new couples Negative appraisals of the family and the step-parent role from society or your social circle. In a lot of ways stepparents are looked down on or seen as not-quite parents, and the very fact that you’re in this situation can lead people to think that the original family has failed in some way, which is a lot of added negativity from outside that really isn’t going to help.
How couples navigate these challenges becomes a big part of how they function as husband and wife. "Researchers note that stepfamily functioning and couple functioning are inexorably linked, suggesting that it is difficult to create a happy second marriage without also creating a workable stepfamily[ii]. This is a dynamic that two people entering their first marriage without children do not have to navigate.
Luckily, research emphasizes that couple functioning in stepfamilies is significantly determined by the same processes and factors that affect any other marriage: communication skills, empathy, values and beliefs etc. But there are some specific factors and issues within blended families that do need special attention.
Bottom line: the usual skills apply, and a few more on top. Establishing Norms As blended families are a fairly new concept relative to traditional first marriages there aren't as many norms and established ways of functioning. The “family” has been around as long as human civilization, but the “blended family” is a pretty new idea. So while families have thousands of years of convention and wisdom to lean on, blended families are a bit more in the dark.
For example there are set norms for looking after and disciplining kids, managing finances and decision making in first marriages, but there's no "set" or expected way of doing things in a blended family[iii]. Couples in blended families have to figure things out for themselves. This can create uncertainty over roles and lead to conflict, especially over complex issues like combining your assets/finances as you get married or looking after step children as well as your own children. These are tough issues to deal with and it can feel like you’re the only ones struggling with them.
So: it would be good for couples to explicitly discuss these issues and agree on how to manage responsibilities, finances and childcare[iv]. Doing so eliminates that uncertainty and helps couples work together on creating their own set of norms for their family. And I imagine this could actually be quite liberating: having no set way of running a family imposed on you, so getting to set the rules yourself. Just make sure it’s a joint process.
Getting the family part right will make things much better in your marriage too. Agreement on parenting and family roles is associated with lower rates of conflict and higher marital satisfaction[v]. Social Support Step-families typically receive less social support from...
One of the things I hear a lot of wives calling their husbands out on is spiritual leadership. Even in marriages that aren’t particularly distressed. This isn’t a subject we’ve tackled before so I thought it would be good to look at so that we can give husbands some help on how to move forward in this area of married life.
This is a tricky topic for a lot of guys. I know in our marriage for the longest time the “spiritual leadership” would look more like Verlynda prodding and me obliging, which is no criticism of her but just reflects my own reluctance. When I talk to guys about this, there are a lot of reasons why we do not show spiritual leadership, including issues like:
Not knowing what to do can be a challenge It can feel like a huge task and one that you’re not qualified for. You don’t know where or how to start It feels awkward. Spirituality is often a private relationship with God and now you are being called to live that out in front of others. Perhaps the spiritual leadership you saw as a child was unattractive because it was dry or hypocritical or just unpleasant Then there’s the huge issue of just feeling like I don’t have it all together enough to lead myself, how am I supposed to lead you?
I just mention these to help people understand there can be a lot of reasons why it is hard to do this whole spiritual leadership thing. I’m sure a lot of people reading this will be struggling with the same issues or hang-ups. I think a big one is just feeling like you’re being called to be something that you aren’t. Not many guys wake up in their marriage one day thinking, “OK, I finally feel like a spiritual leader today”. But that doesn’t exclude you from being able to do it. So let’s unpack this and then give some guidance. Why Spiritual Leadership? Spiritual leadership might be something that God calls each man to in their marriage and their family, but there are also a range of practical life benefits to taking this seriously. A study in 1999[i] looked at nearly 100 married couples and examined the effect of joint spiritual activities compared to individual spiritual activities and beliefs. They looked at how this impacted marriage and found that the benefits of joint spirituality included:
Closer integration of faith into the marriage More perceived benefits to the marriage, for both the husband and wife Less conflict More verbal collaboration Better ability to discuss agreements
This came from shared activities like prayer, worship, spiritual discussion, mission or charity work and church attendance as a couple.
So it’s great to note that doing these things that seem unrelated actually has these tangible benefits inside of marriage. Getting Started With Spiritual Leadership I think the biggest barrier to getting started properly is the belief that you have to have it all together before you can show spiritual leadership. I know this is an issue for me: I’d like to feel like I am an expert before I try something. I guess that’s part perfectionism, part shame-based self-identity, but most importantly it’s about having impossible standards.
I mean, if you stop and think about it, in terms of the Christian faith if you wake up one morning and think to yourself, “I am definitely qualified to be a spiritual leader!” At that moment, you are probably DIS-qualified!
We’re never called to have it all together and we’re never going to be perfect. So instead of thinking that you have to lead this from a place of accomplishment and expertise, why not approach it as a shared journey together? So instead of doing this because you have it all together spiritually, why not do this because you’d like to bring your wife and children with you as you figure out how to grow spiritually?
As part of this, you need to believe that God is actively at work in your marriage and that marriage, including yours, is sacred[ii]. So He is invested in this journey of growth and discovery as well.
I’ve run across a number of couples lately — mainly younger couples — who are watching X-rated movies or pornography in order to “spice up their sex life”. It is not uncommon in our world to think that pornography has something to offer your marriage, but today, we’re going to take a look at what the research says porn really does for, or, more precisely, to your marriage.
So I am going to come at this as if I was talking to a younger couple, maybe newlyweds, and they’ve watched some porn together and they feel like it turns up the heat in the bedroom.
But I need you to understand, as the reader, that I am taking training to become a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist and that means that part of my counseling work is actually helping couples recover from the impact of pornography on marriage. I cannot begin to describe to you the depth of hurt experienced in the hearts of betrayed spouses and in the hearts of pornography addicts, too. Like bad enough for suicide to be on the table.
You should know that I am not a fan of pornography. While it certainly can produce heightened arousal, even if we were to push aside the moral implications of the sexual abuse and trafficking of men and women in that industry, the consequences of using pornography in your marriage are significant and very serious. So while I want to be non-judgmental and this post definitely isn’t aiming to shame anyone, there are some serious warnings to heed here. Porn Impacts Marital Satisfaction Research consistently finds that frequent porn use is linked to lower relationship satisfaction for all kinds of romantic relationships[i][ii]. Porn use is particularly damaging for marriages compared to dating relationships[iii], and this effect gets stronger over time so that the longer you are married and using porn, the more it damages your marital satisfaction.[iv] So something that may seem like harmless fun for dating couples or newlyweds is only going to cause more and more problems the longer you’re married.
Which direction is this effect? Does porn decrease marital satisfaction? Or does decreasing marital satisfaction fuel porn use?
A study in 2004[v] found that an unhappy marriage can be a predictor of frequent porn use. That’s probably entitlement coming out, although it may also be a coping mechanism—if I act out with porn, I can stay married and stay air "faithful”.
But other research shows that porn use can cause marital problems: A recent study in 2017[vi] surveyed married couples for porn use and marital quality in 2006 and then again in 2012. They found that porn use in 2006 predicted lower marital quality in 2012. In fact it was the strongest predictor of low marital satisfaction. So while the effect can go both ways— porn as a symptom and a cause of marital problems— "experimental research suggests that it is porn use that more often negatively affects couples’ outcomes than vice versa[vii]" How Porn Impacts Relationships So let’s look at the specific ways porn is damaging to marriages. Commitment According to a theory called the Investment Model, commitment in relationships is comprised of 3 elements: satisfaction with the relationship, attractiveness of available alternatives and investment in the relationship[viii].
We just seen that satisfaction is impacted by porn use.
Porn use also increases your attention to attractive alternatives to your spouse, thereby lowering commitment to your spouse. Because you are looking at a wide variety of attractive alternatives to your spouse in the porn, you are likely to become less satisfied and committed to a single spouse and more desiring of variety.
This is one of the beliefs implicit in a worldview that accepts pornography: that a variety of sexual partners is more fulfilling than one sexual partner.
Even if you consider yourself faithfully married and you consume porn just to spice things up, you are, by virtue of your actions, also implicitly agreeing that being involved in other people’s sex...
You know how sometimes you get so wrapped up in an issue — some kind of disagreement with your spouse — that you really feel like you cannot see the forest for the trees? It’s as if you no longer remember why you were arguing — you are just arguing about the arguing? Today we are going to help you take a step back so you can see the forest again and figure out why you keep misinterpreting your spouse.
We are going to be looking at attributions, and why this process of attributing or interpreting your spouse’s actions can lead to cycles of arguments and problems that don’t go anywhere. But the cool thing is that these same processes can also be used to start positive cycles in your marriage that keep drawing you closer together.
So attribution is a topic that’s definitely worth learning about. Let’s start with the big one. The Fundamental Attribution Error This is one of my favorite things to talk about!
The fundamental attribution error is something that we all do. When I attribute your actions to a flaw in your character, rather than to an environmental factor then I commit the fundamental attribution error[i].
Where this really gets problematic is when I attribute your actions to a flaw in your character, but I attribute mine to environmental or situational factors.
For example, let’s say you and I are both out working at our respective jobs one day. I get home late. You get home really late. I’m upset because you’re usually home before me and I had to make supper and do a bunch of extra stuff. Here’s how the fundamental attribution error plays out:
I think to myself, she is never home on time: she is so disorganized! (see the character attribution?) You ask me why I was late. I tell you, “Well, traffic was really bad.” (see the environmental attribution?)
See: we could be in the same situation but you have a character flaw whereas for me, I was just caught in some circumstances outside my control!
Or let’s say a couple gets into conflict and they both say a few mean, unkind things to each other. Name calling. She thinks, “He has an anger problem!” (attribution to character) but while she feels bad about her own behavior, she thinks to herself, "If he wasn’t such a jerk she wouldn’t have to talk like that to get through to him!” (attribution to circumstances).
Now I am not defending abusive men, but you get the picture: this happens both in healthy marriages and in conflictual, non-abusive marriages. Why Do We Do This? We all fall into this attribution trap because it is easier to make judgments based on personality rather taking into account all the possible situational variables.
Personal characteristics are easier to identify — they help us to understand a person and make sense of their behavior. These characteristics are more stable in a person and so it is easier and faster to make snap-judgments based on a person’s nature than it is to look for other circumstantial explanations[ii].
Having these concrete judgments in place about a person’s character makes their behavior seem more predictable. Your brain likes being able to make decisions quickly based on information that’s readily available. So rather than looking for all the possible factors that could have influenced your spouse’s actions, it’s easier to just attribute them to his or her character. Easier, but not necessarily more helpful for your marriage. Attributions = Misinterpreting Your Spouse You need to know that this whole fundamental attribution error thing is governed in marriage by how happy your marriage is. You will interpret events and actions according to your existing beliefs about your spouse and your marriage, whether good or bad. And if your spouse acts in a way that does not fit with your perception of the marriage, you will discount or explain away the action.
As a side note: that, by the way, is how a perfectly intelligent spouse who believes she is married to a committed husband can explain away evidence to the contr...
A few days after this episode is released is Veteran’s Day or Memorial Day. We wanted to acknowledge our servicemen and women who serve our country and that of our neighbor, the USA, and to thank you for helping make it possible for us to live lives of freedom and meaning. If you’re not a veteran I would encourage you to take in today’s episode regardless to better understand some of the sacrifices and challenges our military members face on the home front.
It’s hard to imagine a marriage with more strain on it than that of a serviceman or woman and their spouse. I have to confess I thought looking into these marriages was mostly going to be negative — that we’d see a lot of challenges and not a lot of upside. And yet, of course, we’ll see that human resiliency is a beautiful thing and that there are a lot of positive, hopeful things happening in military marriages as well.
Marriage and Military Deployment Of course there are a lot of challenges faced by both the serving soldier and the spouse who remains at home. These can include mental health issues, for example,
Rates of depression are 12% among active service members and 13% among those who have returned from duty[i] Rates of PTSD are 2% among returned service members Wives who are left at home suffer from increased rates of depression, sleep disorders and acute stress[ii]
Military service undeniably puts strain on a marriage, through the emotional roller-coaster of separation and reuniting, and the fears of losing your loved one each time they are deployed. This unfortunately leads to some of these marriages becoming unstable, resulting in divorce rates of 53% among military couples, which is higher than for non-military couples[iii]. So these are serious challenges, but it’s not all bad news.
Despite the challenges of military service some couples report that it strengthens the marriage. A study from 2013[iv] interviewed 118 military couples and found that 44% of them reported "better relationship dynamics" upon reuniting, while 35% reported more destructive communication and 21% reported no change. Almost half of the couples in this situation were able to draw some positive from it, whether that’s from the strong bond they feel for each other, the sense of pride and purpose their service brings, or the support they receive from those around them.
93% of couples were able to identify at least one positive change as a result of the deployment, for example increased confidence and autonomy for the wife, or a new sense of purpose for the husband or a greater appreciation for family life upon return. So even in the midst of extremely tough circumstances couples can still find things to be grateful for. And that’s pretty awesome.
If you are a couple in this situation, or you know someone who is about to face their first deployment, it can be useful to know what to expect. So let’s look at the emotional cycle of deployment and how couples typically react to each stage of the journey. Emotional Cycle of Deployment Couples typically go through five stages when one spouse is deployed to active service for a long period of time[v]. Pre-Deployment Stage This is the time from receiving orders to deploy to then actually leaving. It can be weeks or months.
What to expect:
The wife staying home may experience denial or high levels of fear, or even anticipate losing their spouse for good. They may also feel anger at their soldier husband for leaving, leading to conflict in the marriage. This is going to be a very stressful time so all kinds of emotions are to be expected. The soldier may become emotionally and physically distant as he starts training and bonding with his squad mates. The soldier is, in some sense, mentally already deployed, and already looking ahead to the challenges facing him[vi]. Both spouses may come into conflict and stress over trying to get their affairs in order, for example the husband doing all the important DIY tasks befo...
We are going to look at foreplay today. But before we do, please be reminded that emotional factors are a much stronger determinant of sexual satisfaction and orgasm frequency than biological or practical factors like sexual frequency and lack of foreplay. So make sure the emotional connection gets most of your focus, and then consider what we’re thinking about in this episode!
Questions around foreplay and orgasm are fairly common in marriages. How much foreplay does my wife need to reliably reach orgasm? How much time should I expect my husband to devote to foreplay each time we have sex?
Today we’ll be looking at some of these factors that affect foreplay, orgasm frequency and sexual satisfaction overall, so if your sex life isn’t all you’d like it to be, this is definitely worth your time. But let’s just briefly reiterate the disclaimer above. A study from 1993[i] showed what we probably all know already: individual relationship variables like closeness, intimacy, marital satisfaction etc. predict female sexual satisfaction over and above biological and practical issues like sexual frequency and length of foreplay. We’ve seen this fact reflected numerous times in the research for this podcast, and even produced a whole episode on why emotional intimacy is the key to great sex.
So we’re going to talk about these things, but if you want to improve your sex life, you’ll get the most benefit from improving your emotional connection to one another. Foreplay and Orgasm Duration of Foreplay What’s interesting about this research is that there are some general observations, but the research also really seems to highlight the fact that everyone is unique. There’s no recipe for orgasm: it’s more like a journey of discovery that a couple needs to tackle together and explore together. It requires gentleness and collaboration and curiosity.
So, for example, a couple studies we found indicate that increased time spent in foreplay is often linked to increased probability of orgasm[ii][iii].
However, if you are experiencing some kind of sexual dysfunction then there may be no benefit to spending more time in foreplay: A study by Huey et al[iv] examined 619 women who reported sexual dysfunction and found no support for a link between length of foreplay and female orgasmic response.
Further, the duration of foreplay may differently affect women depending on how regularly they already achieve orgasm during sex. “Extending foreplay and intromission (penetration) might enable some women who were already orgasmic to have more frequent orgasms than they would under shorter periods of stimulation.[v]”
For women who already achieve orgasm at least some of the time, increasing foreplay can make orgasm even more regular. However, for women who rarely or never achieve orgasm, duration of foreplay appears to have little effect. This again suggests that foreplay is not the main issue in sexual satisfaction and orgasm: if you already have the emotional connection then foreplay can help, but if you don't have that connection then foreplay isn't an adequate replacement in itself.
Assuming you’ve got the emotional connection thing nailed, then is there an ideal amount of time to spend in foreplay? Unfortunately it’s not that simple. There are high levels of variability between women. We do not mean to imply promiscuity, but just managing expectations about one’s own personal experience. Some women achieve orgasm with little or no foreplay and some remain inorgasmic after twenty minutes or more of foreplay[vi].
There is also high variability in desired levels of foreplay: when given a questionnaire about their ideal foreplay length, different men and women both reported anywhere from "less than five minutes" to "more than thirty minutes"[vii]. So there’s a huge range in what both men and women prefer. Nature of Foreplay Now the nature of foreplay also is worth considering in addition to the duration of foreplay.
What do you do when your family and/or friends do not approve of your spouse? As it turns out, there are a number of strategies to help with this, but the most important is just doing a good job of taking care of your marriage, regardless of what others think.
It’s a tough situation to be in: you’re fully committed to your marriage and love your wife to bits, but her parent don’t think you’re good enough for her. Or your husband’s friends make it quite clear that they don’t like that you spend so much time together. Marriages don’t exist in a social vacuum: this kind of social disapproval is bound to have some kind of effect. Social Disapproval and Marriage When you’re faced with disapproving friends and family, does it draw you closer together as a couple or pull you apart? Popular culture often talks about a "Romeo and Juliet Effect" where family disapproval intensifies love. This is based on a famous study by Driscoll et al[i] in 1972, who found that feelings of love increase as levels of perceived interference from parents increase.
However, almost every subsequent study into this has found the opposite effect: interference or disapproval from family and friends has negative effects on relationships including lowering relationship satisfaction, reduced relationship stability, reduced commitment, lower feelings of love, higher levels of criticism and less positive appraisals of your spouse[ii][iii].
I was a little surprised by this research, to be honest. It has been my anecdotal observation—this is more watching dating relationships—that when parents disapprove it tends to bind the couple together more strongly. They not only have their newfound love but they also have a common enemy.
Then again, these studies are looking at long term relationships and when I think about that context, I lean more towards the reality that if you have a lot of negative info about your spouse coming from friends and family, that can easily shape your perception of your marriage.
If there’s an upside to this, it is that approval from your social network has positive effects such as improved perceptions of your spouse, greater feelings of love, and greater stability for the relationship. Overall, the positive effects of approval from the social circle are stronger and more consistently found than negative effects of disapproval[iv].
I do think there is a warning here for all of us: just to be careful about how we approach other struggling marriages. I think this research shows that when couples are struggling they really need our support, not our criticism. It is easy to stand outside the marriage and point out all the problems to the person you’re close to, but are you really helping the couple? You could do a lot more for their marriage by being there for them and showing that you believe in and support their marriage, rather than helping them pick it apart. Why Does Approval Matter? You might be wondering why these effects appear. Why should other people’s opinions matter?
Well, every opinion you hear from your friends and family has the potential to, in some way, influence your own thinking. Approval from your social circle helps create a stronger identity for you as a couple: when other people see you as a well-suited couple and approve of this role, this helps you form a joint sense of self and identity. Approval from others also reduces uncertainty about the relationship, while disapproval increases uncertainty. This uncertainty about whether you should really be together alters your perceptions of the relationship and your behavior changes accordingly[v].
Imagine this: you have a disagreement with your spouse about something minor. It would be fairly natural to want to discuss this with a close friend, or a family member. If that person already has a negative opinion of your spouse then that’s going to affect how they respond to your concerns, and the advice they give to you about it.
How would you like to come on a cruise with us? Registration and bookings for The Marriage Cruise for Smart Couples have just opened!
The Marriage Cruise for Smart Couples is a premium marriage retreat, on a deluxe cruise ship, sailing around the Western Caribbean. Ah! What more could one ask for!?
(Yes, that is a picture of the actual ship above!!) Transform Your Marriage Caleb has some amazing, transformational content laid out for the 8 days we’ll be on the Celebrity Silhouette: so be prepared to have your life changed! He really dug deep and designed this research-based program so that what you learn can be taken home to be a blessing to your marriage for years to come. So this is not just meant to be a flash-in-the-pan experience, but something that is truly transformational.
The beauty of this whole retreat is that the cruise ship really takes care of us while we can take care of our marriages. It is an awesome opportunity to step out of the daily grind, take a break from winter, and enjoy a time of relaxation, renewal, romance and creating life-long memories for each couple that joins us. Memories for a Lifetime I want people to look back on this cruise and say, That was a turning point for us. Or, even if your marriage is already pretty good or even if it is awesome, just to be like, wow, going on The Marriage Cruise for Smart Couples really helped us take it to the next level. Who knew there was more? And yet there is, right!?
Yeah even for us we enjoy our marriage and we know how all this works. But we hit plateaus too, and then usually when you do something out of the ordinary, wow, it’s like a whole new level of enjoyment and intimacy and joyfulness together.
Once again, we have gathered all the details in one place here: Marriage Cruise for Smart Couples. Marriage Cruise Overview The cruise leaves February 18 2018 from Florida, right after Valentine’s Day. We’ll be aboard the Celebrity Silhoutte for 8 days and 7 nights. So it leaves Sunday afternoon and returns the next Sunday morning. The cruise departs from Fort Lauderdale, FL, and goes either to Jamaica or Key West for the first stop (that’s to be determined based on how reconstruction goes at Key West). Also the cruise is in the Western Caribbean so these are beautiful spots that were not damaged by the devastating hurricane season this year. After Key West we have one day at sea, then into Costa Maya Mexico, Cozumel, Mexico, George Town Grand Cayman, another day at sea and then home.
As far as the seminars go we have this amazing venue aboard the ship, floor to ceiling windows on an upper deck overlooking the ocean, and we plan to have a welcome reception and registration with hors d’oeuvres the first evening and then, every morning in port we have a session earlier in the morning for just one hour so you can get off the ship and enjoy excursions at each location. For the two sea days, each day will have two 90 minute sessions so we can really maximize the value of that time.
We really designed this so it is about positive transformation. We’re giving you skills that you can use now and in the future, and helping you understand how to create the marriage you want to have. We have some great material on sex and intimacy, communication, creation deeper connection, designing a marriage that creates legacy. And this is all down-to-earth, actionable stuff, not pie in the sky. The resources and training material and exercises and experiential work is all evidence-based: in other words, it works. Marriage Retreat Aboard the Silhouette Here's a quick overview.
Welcome Reception (Sunday, 5 PM aboard the Silhouette)
Session 1: Shortwave Radio Lessons (Monday Morning - Key West, FL)
Purpose: To truly hear and be heard without misunderstandings or unnecessary conflict. Duration: 60 minutes We are going to have some great laughs in this one, but I will be teaching you how to use active listening to really,
Does your marriage involve one spouse working away from home? Or travelling a lot? Maybe you are a military family or you commute to another city for work or do camp work. Let’s talk about some of the challenges and also some ideas to make the most of this situation!
It can be tough being separated from your spouse for long periods of time. And when this happens regularly, due to work or some other circumstance, your marriage is bound to be affected in some way. But that change doesn’t necessarily have to be bad, and with the help of our list of do’s and don’ts you can make sure you stay connected to your spouse no matter the physical distance between you. What is a Long Distance Marriage? Who knew, but long distance couples account for over 1 million couples in the USA[i] and this number is continuing to grow. There are a few flavours of this:
Couples where one spouse goes away for weeks or months at a time for work. Military couples would be an example of this. In Canada we see a lot of this related to the oil industry where camps are set up in northern areas, and husbands go North to work like 3 weeks in one week out kind of thing
There are also dual-commuter couples where both spouses travel away for work or education
And there are couples who live in different geographical locations on a semi-permanent basis due to work or other factors
If you don’t fit into any of those groups, another definition of a long distance relationship (LDR) is simply that the couple are "unable to see each other as often as they like, due to time or distance constraints[ii]".
So how does being in a LDR affect your marriage? There are mixed results from the research on this one, but most find that there are no concrete differences in terms of satisfaction or commitment between long-distance and close-distance relationships[iii]. This means that spending long periods of time apart doesn’t automatically spell doom for your marriage, and making the relationship work is largely up to the individual couple.
So let’s get into the do’s and don’ts of long distance relationships. Do’s and Don'ts Don’ts Do Not Have Unrealistic Expectations If you are in this situation you are probably already aware of some of the common challenges faced in long distance relationships. These include:
Increased financial strain from travelling
Difficulty forming new relationships and friendships in your separate locations and balancing these with your marriage
Difficulty assessing each other's emotional state or the state of the relationship
Try to be aware of these challenges and other issues like loneliness: it then becomes a conversation about something you both experience. Can you discuss this without feeling guilty? Have you chosen to see this as something that gets between you, or can you share the burden together?
Those are expectations that come into play when you are apart. What about when you are together? Avoid putting too high expectations on the time you do spend together: couples often expect their limited time together to be perfect: intimate and romantic and all these wonderful things and can be distressed when this doesn't turn out to be the case. Do Not Be Negative Those expectations can easily lead to negativity in thought or emotion.
A study from 2007[iv] found that negative affectivity (displays of negative emotions) were linked to relationship instability. This effect was stronger for men than women, and also stronger for long distance couples than for geographically close couples.
Being far apart makes those negative comments much more of an issue, because it could be days or weeks before you get to speak to each other again, so you’ll have all that time to stew over every word. Obviously arguments and disagreements will happen in an LDR, like in any marriage, but just be careful that they don’t sour your entire experience of time together. If you fight, make sure you make up quickly to stop it having a lingering effect.
At that moment the final child leaves the family home, you and your spouse go through a transition from parenting to empty nesters. For some, perhaps wives more than husbands, this is almost like postpartum depression as you are confronted with the grief that comes from a loss of a major stage in your life.
So today we’re going to be talking about Empty Nest Syndrome: the impact, the causes and how to support your marriage through this transition.
What Is Empty Nest Syndrome? It is more often associated with women but for both parents, ENS creates a transition in life and a change in roles and responsibilities[i]. This change can be challenging to go through. Sometimes there are feelings of loneliness, depression or distress that come when the final child leaves the family home[ii].
I remember seeing this when I came to pick Verlynda up to move from Vancouver Island, where she was living with her folks. She was the last child. And I was totally unprepared for the grief that I saw. I guess I was inconsiderate: it had not occurred to me that this would be difficult for Verlynda’s mom. Empty Nest: Good or Bad for Happiness? I would tend to think that if you have a good relationship with the last child leaving home, even if you are looking forward to the independence and no more making lunches and the freedom of having an open conversation with your spouse in your home and all that…there’s still some grief at the time of depart.
But, is it a positive or a negative for most people, overall?
Most research shows that for the majority of people, children leaving home is good for marital satisfaction and can also be good for overall life satisfaction.
A classic study from 1975[iii] reports that 71% of couples consider their post-parenting lives to be as good as or better than their lives with children in the house, with only 6% of women and no men reporting that their lives are universally worse.
A slightly more recent study by White & Edwards[iv] surveyed 402 parents and found that children leaving produced significant improvements for martial happiness regardless of the characteristics of the children or parents. Similarly, another study finds that children leaving the home improves psychological wellbeing for parents and Mitchell & Lovegreen (2009) found that only a minority of parents experience a negative "empty nest syndrome”[v].
Who knew, right? Do you think our 11 year old is ready to live on her own?
Popular wisdom paints the empty nest phase as one of the loneliest and hardest times in a parent’s life. But for a majority of parents, this clearly isn’t the case. So what are the benefits of the last child moving out?
The researchers found that children moving out allows for increased "alone time" as a couple, more intimacy and spontaneity, greater freedom, and improved financial conditions[vi]. The general picture here is that it gives you more time and resources to spend on each other, rather than on the kids. All of this can positively impact marital satisfaction.
However, contact with children is still important. While marital satisfaction may increase after children leave, overall life satisfaction only increases when the parents remain in frequent contact with the children[vii].
That’s a very interesting caveat. Your marriage may improve, but without the kids still in your life, the net gain to your overall life satisfaction isn’t much. This makes perfect sense because you’ve invested so much in your children. Staying in touch allows you to maintain the value of that connection you’ve created.
So the empty nest stage can, if you keep in regular contact with the children, be good for marriage. However, it is also possible that children leaving the home can be a crisis time for marriages due to the sudden changes in routine and identity this stage creates[viii]. Some research finds that the empty nest phase of marriage is often the least satisfying, and has the highest rates of divorce and conflict[ix].
This is not a very well known term: trauma bonding. But if you are in an abusive relationship, or are supporting someone else who is in one, or if you experienced abuse as a young person then you will find this information to be a vital key in unlocking your recovery journey.
The issue of trauma bonding is a fascinating subject but also very difficult for those who are implicated in this kind of situation. Today we’re going to be looking at what it is, how it develops, how it can impact marriages and finally what you can do about it. Trauma Bonding Explained Trauma bonding is the formation of powerful emotional attachments in abusive relationships. These bonds are seen to develop in a range of situations including abusive marriages, and also in abusive families, in hostage situations and in cults.
It occurs where the abused or mistreated individual feels positive regard for their abuser[i], feels like they need the abuser or continually returns to the abuser despite the harm they do[ii].
It is often characterized by a sense of being unable to live with the abuser and being unable to live without them. It’s sometimes referred to as Stockholm Syndrome after a famous bank robbery in Sweden in 1973, in which the hostages began to develop feelings of trust and affection for their captors.
Given that the context of this website is marriage, we’re going to be talking about this in relation to abusive marriages. However, if you’re in a different kind of situation; maybe you experienced childhood sexual abuse, you will be able to better understand that from what you learn today.
So this is a very difficult subject. And in fact, relationships with trauma bonds often look like addictions. Just the idea of continuing to do something (being in the relationship) despite knowing the negative consequences, and sacrificing all other aspects of your life for the relationship, has close parallels with the behavior of drug or alcohol addicts[iii].
Like addictions, trauma bonds can therefore be a lifelong struggle as the abused person continues to fall into the same cycle over and over.
Bystanders such as a sibling who sees you in an abusive marriage can look into your situation and wonder why you don’t leave. Well, the research we look at today should help give some understanding as to why leaving is so difficult. Why Do Trauma Bonds Form? Abusive relationships are formed though a kind of "social trap" where the trauma bond makes it hard for the abused partner to leave the relationship.
Here’s an example of how it may go. The first instance of abuse in a relationship is seen as an isolated incident and the abuser's attempts to reconcile and make amends end up strengthening the relationship bond. They are usually really good at winning the abused spouse back, at convincing them it was an isolated incident, often even convincing them it was their fault for inciting the anger that was involved.
And this works. The repeated incidents of abuse shift the abused spouse's beliefs towards thinking that it must in some way be their own fault for causing or allowing the abuse. Here’s a quote: "By the time the woman realizes that the abuse is inescapable, the traumatically produced emotional bond is quite strong.[iv]" Factors Contributing to Trauma Bonds From the research, we identified five factors that contribute to trauma bonding in abusive relationships[v]: Power Imbalance A power imbalance in a relationship can produce negative self-beliefs and low self-esteem in the subjugated individual. In the oppressed or abused spouse.
This power imbalance makes them feel like they "need" the more powerful spouse because they are not capable or strong enough to live without them. They come to internalize the more powerful individual's view of them as being weak, and the abuser therefore comes to see themselves as even more powerful, which increases the imbalance of power, forming a cycle of dependency. The sense that you need the more powerful spouse...
I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s easy to fall into the “if…then” trap when it comes to money. If we had an extra 400 dollars a month, then dot dot dot. Or, If we had a 5 bedroom home instead of a 3 bedroom home then dot dot dot. And when we start doing this if...then thing, it begins to impact our marriage.
Money is definitely top of the worry list for a lot of couples around the world. I know how hopeless it can feel about changing your financial situation, so I want to encourage you that we have some good news. The great news is not some get-rich-quick scheme. No, it’s that you can shift your marriage so that you can move away from that hopeless feeling, regardless of your financial situation. So let’s jump in. How Financial Issues Impact Marriage Before we get to the solution we need to spell the problem out. Not surprisingly, research finds that financial strain does impact marriage by reducing marriage quality and also reducing the stability of the marriage[i].
What’s fascinating is you can actually put a number to this. The direct link between financial strain and reduced marital satisfaction accounts for up to 15% of the total variation in marital satisfaction[ii].
If you are struggling financially or unhappy with your financial situation, you are far more likely to see your entire marriage as not working. I think this is good to point out because in this situation you have a pretty specific issue but you’re extrapolating it to a much larger one.
For me, that’s a checkpoint. As in: stop and think about it. Because what we just identified is that you may only have a money issue. But you’ve made that into a marriage issue. I think it begs the question, is that necessary? Yes — financial strains impacts marriage. But how much power have you given to that issue?
So money can be made into a bigger issue than it really is. But: just to continue the thought of how marriage is impacted by finances: financial issues also impact marriage indirectly through the way they change how you act. Financial strain due to unemployment, debt, low income or other issues increases stress and depressive symptoms for both spouses. This, in turn, reduces the amount of social support, warmth & affection which the spouses show to each other and increases the level of negative communication: things like anger, criticism or dislike. This behavior reduces marital satisfaction, and this reduced satisfaction increases depressive symptoms, creating a destructive cycle[iii]. So the way money makes you think and talk to each other ends up having a worse impact on your marriage than the money problem itself.
Other research supports this: A study from 2008[iv] entitled “Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness, but it Helps” compared low income and medium income couples. Low-income couples had higher levels of psychological distress and also scored lower on measures of marital adjustment.
And as we all know, financial difficulties are also one of the main reasons couples give after divorcing for why their marriage broke down[v].
Conversely, high income is directly linked to high marital satisfaction, and also indirectly influences it by reducing pressure and stress within the marriage[vi].
Now I know at this point it sounds like we have a simple formula: increase the moolah, increase the marriage mojo. But just stay with me for a bit longer. Financial Satisfaction I’d like to look at financial satisfaction. Financial satisfaction is not about having more money. It’s about being satisfied with the money you have.
Now financial satisfaction is strongly linked to marital satisfaction[vii]. As I mentioned, financial satisfaction is not the same as simply having lots of money, although it is negatively correlated with financial strain. There are other factors which influence financial satisfaction in marriage, including:
The perception that you have enough money and are coping. Smart financial decisions: families and couples who pay bills on t...
What if you’ve been doing things in your marriage for years that you now realize have really left you disconnected? And yet both of you want to rebuild and recover what you have? Where do you start? What if you’ve been doing things in your marriage for years that you now realize have really left you disconnected? And yet both of you want to rebuild and recover what you have? Where do you start?
Today we’re taking two questions from our wonderful podcast patrons relating to important issues of trust and intimacy. Here’s the first from Mac:
Early on in our ten-year marriage, I would shut my husband's feelings down. God has since convicted me about my steamrolling of his feelings and shown me how I was disrespectful and inconsiderate to his side of our marriage. I was so concerned with not being walked on that I actually walked on him. Now I think he's afraid to open up because he avoids negativity of any kind between us. And we are coming out of him seeking emotional approval from outside parties (not a sexual or explicit relationship) but just seeking affirmation from work performance above our relationship and being open in general to anyone willing to build up his ego. He has expressed his commitment to our marriage and wants to get back on the same page but we seem to have a problem of figuring out where to start. And while he says everything I want to hear, he lacks follow through. Simultaneously, there is a temptation for him to find his identity in his work because he works in a very highly respected field. How can I compete with the meaning he finds in his career? And beyond that how can I compete with the numerous women willing to fall all over him because of his career?
And here’s question number two, which relates to shared leisure activities, a topic we recently went over in detail. This question is from JM:
My wife and I need to develop a hobby together but our interests are pretty different. We do a lot of family activities like camping, hiking, and biking but since the kids are little we can't really do those regularly on our own. We end up doing house tasks after the kids go to sleep or watching TV or working on work together. We both feel a need to have a shared activity that is just us. My ideas are more: sports, working out, games (banana grams etc.) and hers are: reading, history, cooking, learning something new, art. If we didn't have to find childcare we'd both like to go biking together. We are struggling to agree on a shared activity that we will both find fun. Of course, either one of us would be willing to do the desired activity of the other but our goal is to really both have fun? Any ideas for how to get started?
Listen to the podcast for Caleb’s answer to both questions!
So what if you’re good friends with another couple and the wife there is a little too attentive to your husband? Or, another patron is asking: what if both my spouse and I are experiencing PISD (post infidelity stress disorder)?
Today we’re going to be handling two questions from our much-valued patrons of our podcast. This first question from Chewy relates to boundaries with other married couples. Here’s the full question:
Can you talk about boundaries with other married couples? My best friend began to make jokes that were borderline sexually inappropriate. Pun on words type humor that I don't necessarily find humorous but a few times my husband would join in and banter. He is very word-y and so I felt like this was a threat to our relationship.
At times I've felt that my friend envied our relationship and especially my husband's attention to me and his financial provision for our family. I have also felt that my husband has appreciated her attentiveness and appreciation of his actions. I feel that she is just more immature in her faith and Christian walk but have begun to wonder how often we should be in community with her and her husband. I have also seen her be more attentive to another mutual married guy friend. I feel for her because I think her actions come from a hurting place.
My husband seems to be vulnerable to words of affirmation in general because that tends to be his love language and I am more practical. I don't praise as often because I'm busting my butt just as much as he is! Working full-time and managing a lot of household tasks like schooling and budgeting. I want to be more vocal in my appreciation because I think he needs it but I can't manage to do so without feeling fake. I say things like "Thank you" "I really appreciate your help" "I love that you can XYZ to help me" but I feel like he wants more praise in the way of "You are my hero" "I don't know how you can xyz" or more over the top type comments that I can't seem to say without feeling like I'm worshiping him.
My husband and I experienced a difficult few years due to other circumstances (I talked to an old boyfriend via Instagram and it was clear this old flame still felt attentive towards me - my husband went on a revenge track to show me he was attractive too we have since with the help of your podcast worked through this phase) and feel that he may have been vulnerable to her attention more than he normally would.
We have talked these instances through multiple times but now I'm wondering how do we balance a healthy mix of time for just him and I to rebuild our bond and strengthen our marriage with time for our two families to be together. We both have small children and are in very similar phases of life but their family has a dysfunctional marriage at least more so than ours or maybe just different. I've tried encouraging and it seems to help but I can't help but feel that I'm just not sure what healthy in this case should look like. Our kids very much enjoy being together and our families have fun when hanging out.
How can I tell if we have crossed into dangerous territory or if I'm just being over sensitive? I will say that my husband is more passive and isn't necessarily the one instigating shared time, it more comes from my friend and her husband seems to go along with it. We are all Christians and looking to raise our kids with good examples. I have felt a tension between feeling like I need to limit shared time and also being a good friend. I am more of a homebody and prefer to just hang with my husband who also would be okay doing the same but I know we need community time as well. Help!
And here’s question number 2, from MarkyMark, in relation to Post Infidelity Stress Disorder, which we devoted a full episode to back in March:
Can you please discuss how to proceed if both partners are experiencing PISD simultaneously?
Listen to the podcast for Caleb’s answer to these two questions!
This is a question that comes up more often than I would have expected. We’ll address this issue of shared interests but at the end of the post I am going to go a whole layer deeper and tell you what really matters for couples that are focusing on this issue.
Some couples seem to spend all their time together and have exactly the same interests. Others seem to have nothing in common and their leisure time is a constant battle between their individual preferences. If you’re in the latter group you may be wondering to what extent you are expected to join in with your spouse’s interests and hobbies. So we’re going to examine this issue and how it can impact marriages. Clarifying Shared Leisure or Interests Whether we’re talking hobbies or shared leisure or shared interests, it’s helpful to clarify that in order for something to truly fall into this category the activities need to be[i]
Expected to be enjoyable by BOTH spouses Freely chosen by BOTH spouses
That might sound obvious but often the contention comes in right here because either one person is not enjoying it, or one person does not feel like they were part of the decision. This is a challenge for being honest with each other and with ourselves: don’t call it shared if it’s not.
It’s OK if you’re happy to do something with your spouse because he or she enjoys it and you just enjoy being with them. Just make sure it is fair: so that somehow that imbalance is reciprocated even in other ways.
I think it’s also good to point out that shared activities can be joint or parallel. Joint are interactive and undertaken together. Parallel are undertaken together but not interactive. For example, going to a swimming club: you’ll change separately, you won’t interact while swimming etc. But it’s still a joint activity.
I think this is helpful to note because it begs the question: are you wanting more activities together or more interaction? If you only want the latter, it may be that you’re focusing on the wrong problem. More on that later. Shared Interests and Marriage Satisfaction Spending free time together and having shared interests is linked to increased marital satisfaction[ii].
Having shared interests is a sign of high levels of intimacy as it shows that the couples are choosing to spend their free time together. Shared leisure also predicts higher self-reported feelings of love for your spouse and less conflict in the marriage[iii]. So, at least initially, this seems to be a good thing, right?
However, it's slightly more complicated than just shared free time equals marital satisfaction. For starters, the interests really do have to be shared: a study from 2002[iv] studied couples over 10 years for changes in shared leisure and its effects on marriage. They found that involvement in interests that the husband liked but the wife disliked was "both a cause and a consequence of wives' dissatisfaction". Forcing or expecting your spouse to care about the same things as you isn’t going to be good for your marriage.
There are a whole range of other factors that play into this other than simply how long you spend on what activity, and who enjoys it. Here are some of them[v]:
Satisfaction with the leisure time (both of you finding it enjoyable) is correlated with marital satisfaction. This satisfaction with the joint leisure time is a more important predictor of marital satisfaction than the amount of time spent in such activities. Marital satisfaction is linked to the percentage of free time spouses chose to spend with each other, rather than the total number of hours. That’s a very nuanced but interesting detail. It’s saying this: if you have 2 free hours a week, and you spend one of that with your spouse, that’s 50%. If you have 8 free hours a week and you spend 2 of those with your spouse, that’s 25%. Spouse’s with the 50% ratio will be more satisfied with their marriage than the 25% spouse who is getting double the time.
What about age difference in marriage? If you marry someone who is quite a bit older than you, does this make your marriage experience different from the experience of couples who are similar in age? Let’s find out!
If you’re struggling with your marriage and may be wondering if the age difference— which is not something you can change — is an issue, the things we go over today should be useful and above all hopeful. Because while the research does identify some challenges faced by couples with large age differences, overall he message is a positive one. Age Gap Statistics Let’s start with some facts and stats about age-heterogeneous couples, or those with a bigger than normal age gap. About 10% of marriages have an age difference of more than 10 years[i] and there are more of these kinds of marriages now than in 1980. So these marriages are not uncommon and are on the rise.
As you might imagine, men are more likely to be married to a younger spouse than women[ii] and this percentage increases with age: the percentage of men marrying younger spouses is lowest in the 20-24 age range at 35% and then rises to 67% by age 40 and 73% by age 70.
Interestingly, these effects are observed across all western cultures and most non-western cultures, with a few exceptions, such as The Philippines and Costa Rica, where women marrying younger men is more common[iii]
This pattern of men marrying younger women being the norm has remained stable over the past few decades although the rates of women marrying younger men are increasing. For second marriages and marriages later in life (at age 50+) there is more diversity in age gaps between spouses than in younger couples[iv].
Age-heterogeneous couples are more common in black marriages and in those with lower socioeconomic status[v].
So the statistics are interesting, both for those of us not experiencing such an age gap — Verlynda and I are just over two years apart in age (she’s younger) — and for those who are in a marriage that has a larger age difference. But the real question is, how does age difference impact marital satisfaction? Age Differences and Marital Satisfaction Turns out that’s a hard question to answer! Results on the effect of age difference on marriage are very mixed, but overall age-dissimilar marriages are "more alike than dissimilar to coeval marriages[vi]". “Coeval” just means of the same age.
So this researcher is noting that typically a marriage with an age gap doesn’t look much different than a marriage between couples of similar age. But: other research does note some issues. So let’s just go through all this and look at the different conclusions to see what we can learn.
Older research[vii] often finds that marriages with large age gaps have lower marital quality and satisfaction, and are less stable than couples who are of similar ages.
Being similar is normally considered a good thing and predictive of marital satisfaction: particularly similarity in values, upbringing, and socioeconomic status. Values and norms in society change as time goes on, so couples of significantly different ages may have different values, which could lead to lower agreement and lower overall satisfaction[viii]. So this dissimilarity in upbringing and worldview may lead to conflict and communication, although it’s worth noting that, as we saw in our episode on whether opposites attract, the situation is not as black and white as saying that dissimilarity is bad.
Age differences could also lead to a power imbalance, which can increase tension and conflict. This is based on Resource Theory, a theory of relationships which states that whichever spouse brings more resources to the marriage will exhibit greater control.
The older spouse is likely to be in a better job and have more life experience etc., and so by "bringing more to the marriage" they naturally tend to make more of the decisions. However, it can also work the other way if youth and attractiveness are seen as the "...
Purpose and meaning. This is that deeper layer in marriage where you get to explore the meaning of having been brought together as a couple. And, how you want to impact the world. How you want to create a legacy: the value that you leave behind as your life comes to a close.
Everyone wants to feel like their life has meaning, and marriage creates a special kind of meaning for couples: shared identity and sense of purpose, and a partner with whom you can impact the world.
Shared purpose starts with finding meaning. Meaning-making is drawn from our individual identities, shaped by nature and nurture. Once we are married and begin to have repeated interactions with our spouse, the interaction formulates a more stable sense of self (of who I am, who you are).
So my relationship to Verlynda, as my spouse, modifies my identity. And then we create this common world together based on our interactions and on the common front we present to the world[i]. Meaning Starts With Your Shared Story Every couple creates a shared story of their relationship: how they have interpreted the events that led to them coming together and a joint vision for the future. I see this in our lives. Just over a year ago we were preparing to leave on a year-long trip in our travel trailer. Having to create this vision ourselves and then explain it to others confronted us with the need to make meaning or have some sense of shared purpose. Having to explain yourself and rationalize what you’re doing prompts this process.
I think any major life transition for a couple is going to result in this process of creating a vision for yourselves and for others to grab hold of.
But I think particularly at the start of a marriage, in its early stages, couples have to create this shared sense of identity and create a sense of meaning to their relationship. They’re bringing their individuality together, but they are also creating a new, jointly developed meaning. And this helps the couples make sense of their relationship and also it makes the future seem more stable and certain[ii].
So a study my researcher provided looked at the stories that newlywed couples told about how they met and about their experiences dating. The content of these stories and the shared meaning they represented was a strong predictor of marital wellbeing[iii]. Here’s some specific points of interest from this research:
Storytelling Process. Telling the stories in a collaborative way, with high agreement over the details, predicts marital wellbeing as it suggests a strongly held sense of shared meaning to the relationship. Disagreement over the details or conflict during storytelling suggests couples have not formed a strong sense of meaning. This is where we start to see purpose being defined: the couple has a shared, synchronous sense of having been brought together.
Storytelling Style. Telling the story as a narrative, rather than just a list of events, and telling it with a sense of drama are both linked to marital wellbeing as they show that the couple are very invested in their shared history. This animated interest reflects some of the value they place on the process of uniting their lives together.
Story Content: what the couples actually chose to tell in their stories was also significant:
Attributing tensions or difficulties to factors outside the couple, rather than to yourself or your partner, indicates that the couple have a strong sense of cohesion and was linked to high wellbeing Framing the story as a conflict or focusing on barriers that were overcome, such as overcoming past relationships or dealing with disapproval from parents, was linked to lower satisfaction. If the whole “story” of your relationship is defined as one of conflict and turmoil then it will naturally become less stable.
What I take from this is that couples who have some deep sense of destiny or providence or God’s will in bringing them together have a more meaningful story behind why they ...
Remarriage after bereavement. Maybe I get a little selfish and hope that I’ll never have to face the loss of a spouse. When I’m feeling more noble and altruistic, I hope my spouse will never have to face it. But regardless, nearly 100% of couples face the loss of their significant other during their lifetime. And so if this reality is so common, it’s worth talking about.
Losing your spouse is one of the hardest things any person can go through. Amidst the grief and sadness, you have the question of remarriage: when is it ok to remarry? How will my new marriage compare to my old one? Should I even be comparing them? Today we’re going to be looking at this topic and hopefully offering some hope to those of you in this situation. Background Info about Remarriage We’re just talking about remarriage after bereavement today. Not remarriage after divorce- that’s a rather separate issue. But for both of us here at OYF: this is our first marriage. We don’t actually have any close connections in our peer group who have remarried after bereavement. And both sets of our parents are still living. So we’re definitely abstracted from this in terms of experience.
But we do have some research to help frame the issue of remarriage. Here are some stats to get us started:
Men are more likely to remarry across all age groups. Remarriage rates decline with age for both men and women. Women's likelihood of remarrying declines more sharply with age than it does for men[i]. As they get older they become less likely to remarry. These patterns are true across cultures.
Remarriage rates decline with age for both genders. This could be due to a lack of availability of potential partners, or may also reflect a reduced interest in remarrying.
Older widows often cite freedom from having to care for their spouse as a reason not to remarry in later life[ii]. Which makes sense — if you see someone caring for a spouse with a long, protracted terminal illness: they are not only learning to become more independent as the illness progresses, but they are also carrying a huge burden of care. And I could definitely see someone coming through that being more reluctant to remarry.
When do people tend to remarry? Rates of remarriage drop just after bereavement and then rise. This is different from the remarriage rates for divorce, where people often remarry quickly.
Clearly, a time of mourning is needed before remarriage after the death of your spouse, but perhaps this finding is also hinting at a social norm or taboo stating that it is inappropriate to remarry too quickly after being widowed[iii].
12 months is sometimes considered the acceptable time to wait before re-marriage, and there is actually a large increase in marriages among bereaved men and women in the 13th month after the bereavement[iv]. This suggests that a good percentage of the bereaved consider a year an appropriate time to wait before moving on with a new partner.
I think if you’re recently bereaved then that alone should offer some hope: right now you may feel like you’ll never recover, but perhaps it’s comforting to know that for some people the healing process moves along to a point they feel ok remarrying after just a year.
Of course, it doesn’t always go that way, and every circumstance is different. Overall rates of remarriage are much lower after bereavement than divorce: 5% of women and 12% of bereaved men remarry, compared to 69% and 78% of divorced women and men, respectively[v].
Interestingly, widowed people often marry other widows, with 45% or bereaved men and 42% of bereaved women doing so[vi]. Perhaps the shared experience of having gone through such a terrible loss makes them uniquely able to comfort and support each other. Issues Affecting Remarriage We’re going to cover some interesting factoids here, talking about the influences that come into play.
In a general sense: either post-divorce or post-bereavement, it’s my understanding that the divorce rates for s...
Perfectionism is not too far from any of our hearts. Certainly, anyone who is on Facebook or Instagram knows that we, just like everybody else, tend to present the perfect image of ourselves on these channels. But: we want to ask the question, how does this affect our marriage?
The topic of perfectionism was suggested by one of our readers, and it’s certainly an interesting one. What is perfectionism? Is it a good thing? How can it impact marriage when one spouse is only satisfied with perfection and the other finds it hard to live up to their standards? What is Perfectionism? Perfectionism usually comes in one of three flavors[i]:
Self-oriented perfectionism: requiring yourself to be perfect Other-oriented perfectionism: requiring other people to be perfect Socially prescribed perfectionism: belief that others hold unrealistic expectations about you: believing that others require you to be perfect.
A related concept is perfectionistic self-presentation, which is the desire to be seen as perfect by others[ii]. This includes actions such as self-promotion, desire to hide imperfections, and reluctance to talk about your own imperfections. Obviously needing to be seen as perfect is going to impact a marriage in quite a big way, especially if you’re afraid to be vulnerable around your spouse.
I think it’s helpful to take a step back from the role that perfectionism plays in your marriage and ask, “What kind of perfectionism do we each struggle with?” You’ll want to nuance your response based on whether it is self or other-oriented, or if it socially prescribed. Is Perfectionism a Good Thing? There are mixed thoughts on this.
When you have these perfectionistic traits, it is inevitable that you would feel unsatisfied or stressed if you do not meet the standards set on you (by yourself or by perceived others).
Some may argue that it is useful or essential for a high-achieving life while others argue that it is unhelpful or detrimental to your wellbeing.
Some researchers have differentiated between adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism, in which adaptive perfectionism is seen as a form of motivation and hard-working attitude, and so is linked to positive outcomes.
Adaptive perfectionism is correlated with higher achievement but neither perfectionism nor achievement are correlated with life satisfaction[iii]. However, both adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism are linked to highly negative outcomes such as anxiety, depression and low self-esteem, as well as a variety of interpersonal problems, which we’ll get to in just a moment[iv]. So even if perfectionism helps drive you to succeed it comes at a steep cost.
So the bottom line is it may help you achieve more but it will cost you. For me, I think perfectionism is contrary to the gospel. Those of us who are born again are all valuable, fallible children of God. So our worth is something instilled in us and given to us but we also acknowledge that we have an innate, undeniable potential to fail.
Perfectionism is incapable of helping with either point, although it attempts to. It cannot provide worth because when is perfect ever perfect enough? And it cannot preserve us from proving that we have a fallen nature: that we sin, we act in ways that are not congruent with our values or with God’s values, we let our spouses down from time to time.
So in my mind, perfectionism just becomes a breeding ground for shame. For that reason, it is unhelpful. The Effect of Perfectionism on Marriage So let’s look at how this touches marriage specifically.
The reality is that perfectionism in marriage is more likely to help us get our ugly on than anything else. Let’s break this down according to the three kinds of perfectionism: self-oriented, other-oriented and socially prescribed. Self-Oriented Effects The fear of being seen as imperfect may prompt you to hide parts of yourself from your spouse. Physically, yes, but I’m thinking mainly in terms of psychologically.
I recently completed 4 and a half days of training on the assessment and treatment of sex addiction. You might be thinking “I’m not a sex addict so this isn’t relevant”, but I’d encourage you to listen to this week’s podcast regardless because we’ll also talk a lot about what healthy sexuality looks like in this show. There’ll be plenty of food for thought whether this is an issue in your marriage or not.
What Sex Addiction Is and Is Not
To begin with, let’s clarify what we’re talking about with “sex addiction”. It is not:
A high desire or couples that enjoy a lot of sex. We need to differentiate compulsive vs. healthy sex:
Compulsive: using genitals to avoid feelings. Intimacy: closeness and affection are enhanced through sex Compulsive relationships are marked by loneliness, possessiveness, jealousy, anger, and alienation. Healthy intimacy affects the growth of both individuals Healthy courting and bonding is an honest, slow process. There’s no ‘game’ in the courting process. I’ve never heard mention of a couple who are sexually addicted to each other
Sex addiction is not necessarily porn addiction. Sex addiction is not necessarily sex offending — although a lot of sex offenders are also sex addicts.
So what IS sex addiction? There are 10 criteria:
Loss of control over your actions Compulsive behavior Efforts to stop Loss of time to your addiction Preoccupation with sex and sexual thoughts Inability to fulfill obligations due to your addiction Continuation in the addiction despite negative consequences Escalation- behavior continually getting more extreme to satisfy cravings Losses due to the negative consequences of addiction Withdrawal
Differences between Addictive and Healthy Sexuality
Addictive Sexuality Healthy Sexuality
Feels shameful Fosters positive self-worth
Is illicit, stolen or exploitative Has no victims
Compromises values Operates within a value system
Draws on fear for excitement Uses intimacy for excitement
Reenacts childhood abuse Cultivates a sense of being an adult
Disconnects from oneself Fosters a sense of self
Creates a world of unreality Expands reality through being in touch with the present
Is self-destructive and dangerous Relies on safety
Uses conquest or power Is mutual, consensual, and equal
Serves to medicate and kill pain Fosters self-regulation of emotions
Is dishonest or requires a double life Originates in integrity and authenticity
Becomes routine, grim or joyless Is spontaneous, fun and playful
Demands perfection Accepts the imperfect
Suffocating, demanding, clinging or disengaged Is respectful of boundaries, accepting and intimate
Causes of Sex Addiction
Family backgrounds:
Families of origin for sex addicts are characteristically rigid (77% of addicts) and disengaged (87%) Addicts in the family (87%)
Childhood issues
Emotional abuse: 97% Sexual abuse: 81% Physical abuse: 72%
So the family and upbringing play a huge part in almost all cases. A lot of the recovery work involves addressing childhood trauma.
Pornography is a catalyst or portal to amplify sex addiction. I like to see it as a very broken way of coping with pain from trauma, abuse, neglect, etc. The addict absolutely must take responsibility for all of their choices — but there are significant, tragic things that have happened in their lives that have made them vulnerable to these choices in a way that those of use without those experiences are not going to be nearly as vulnerable.
Treatment for Sex Addiction
Is there hope for sex addicts?
Yup. It’s amazing to hear stories of very broken lives and marriages. So much destruction and pain. Now they are whole and their lives are manageable and they are pursuing healthy courtship and healthy intimacy.
What about their spouses?
Coping with a spouse who is addicted to sex can be very challenging. Dealing with these issues can be similar to dealing with t...
In our previous show, we talked about the neuroscience of romantic love. Today we’re going to address the behavioral side of things to help you rekindle the passion in your marriage.
Dating can be one of the most exciting times in any relationship: it’s when you’re constantly thinking about each other, finding out so much about each other and forming that deep connection. But what makes dating so awesome? How do men and women come at it differently? And how can a married couple make this come alive in their marriage again? What Makes Dating & the Early Stages of Love so Enjoyable? Last time we looked at our brains and how there are pleasure and reward systems built right into them. You’ll recall we talked about romantic love (which is out front during the courtship or dating phase of a relationship) and partner attachment (which is the steady, committed love of lasting marriages)
Romantic love is linked to systems in the brain which "reward" you with strong feelings of pleasure whenever you think about or spend time with your spouse[i]. This motivates you to want to spend time with your spouse or girl/boyfriend at the start of a relationship. Typically this phase of love lasts 12-18 months[ii], but can last an entire lifetime[iii]. We talked about extending that last time.
Self-expansion theory, developed by husband and wife researchers Arthur and Elaine Aron, speaks to this situation[iv]. In their view, romantic love is a period of rapid self-expansion by including the beloved in your sense of who you are.
During the very early stages of the relationship, you learn a lot about your beloved and get to grow as a person and experience new things by integrating aspects of your spouse into your own life. The rate at which you can do this declines after the initial period of the relationship: you start to run out of new things to learn about your spouse.
So dating is the most exciting phase of a relationship because you’re getting to grow as a person by getting to know your spouse, and this inevitably starts to taper off the longer a relationship lasts. The other side of the coin is the concept of habituation: the longer you do something/spend time with someone, the more you get used to it/them, and the less rewarding the time becomes[v]. Sniff.
Intimacy and sex then play into these early stages of love and then marriage. For those that are new to our podcast, we speak out of a Christian worldview and we practice and hold the value that extramarital sex is not only wrong, but it’s also unhelpful. On the ‘unhelpful’ point, we’ve noted before that the best sex is happening inside of marriage so we not only have moral reasons for asserting this value, but research-based evidence to support the benefits as well.
Back to our point. Let’s talk about how intimacy works. Remember that when we look at intimacy, we mean the whole enchilada, not just sex.
This is interesting. According to a study by Baumeister et al in 1999[vi], passion is a function of changes in intimacy.
So when intimacy is stable (either low or high), passion is low. But when intimacy is increasing, passion is high.
Intimacy is often increasing fastest at the start of the relationship, as you become more comfortable disclosing information about yourself and generally become closer. "As relationship partners gain an understanding of each other’s innermost thoughts and feelings, the rate of intimacy growth may taper off over time as they have less to learn about each other and the rate of engagement in novel relationship activities diminishes[vii]."
This intimacy growth during dating makes the start of a relationship a lot of fun. But sex comes into the equation once we get married too.
The frequency of sex (although not necessarily the quality of sex) is highest at the start of the relationship. In later years it becomes less frequent, and as the research, this points out this is often due to less interest, higher rates of dysfunction and difficulty,
Who knew your brain was doing so much when you were falling in love? Well, we want to help you fall in love again (or, more deeply) by helping you get those brain circuits working in support of keeping the romance in your marriage!
When most people talk about love over the course of a lifetime they say that it begins with a fiery, passionate love at the start of a relationship, which slowly dwindles to be replaced by a more stable, less exciting, companionate sort of love. This is actually mirrored in the different brain systems involved in love, but as we look through the research we’ll see that a loss in passion over time is far from inevitable. The Neuroscience of Love & Relationships There are 3 distinct brain systems involved in intimate relationships[i]:
Sex drive Courtship attraction, aka romantic love Partner attachment
Each has a separate set of associated emotions, behaviours and brain systems. What we’re going to do is look at courtship attraction (or, romantic love) and then partner attachment. And then we’re going to look at the changes in romantic love over time to see if we can actually keep some of that heat going in marriage. Romantic Love Romantic love is observed in all cultures worldwide and can be felt even at a young age before puberty & sex drive develop[ii]. For example, your kindergarten teacher crush.
When you begin a romantic relationship as an adult, intensely romantic love typically lasts up to 18 months[iii], after which partner attachment becomes the main driving force of the relationship. One way to describe this is you have a lot of heat at the start of your relationship, then as you’re married and settle in for the long haul, your brain chemistry changes to support a steady burn which is more sustainable.
So romantic love, therefore, provides motivation to find a single long-term spouse, and attachment provides to motivation to stay together over the years. You need both. Romantic Love in the Brain How does romantic love affect the brain? A study by A. Aron from 2005[iv] used fMRI scans to monitor brain activity in 17 people who had been "intensely in love" for a short period of time (1-17 months) when looking at a photo of their beloved.
The areas of the brain that were activated were linked to the dopamine "reward system", associated with pleasure (through the release of dopamine), general arousal, focused attention and motivation to pursue and acquire rewards. Romantic love is therefore considered a motivational force as well as just a feeling: you feel motivated to spend time together by the pleasure and arousal you experience. Think of love as driving the couple together with a very specific focus on one another.
As a sidebar: this system is separate from the sex drive, although they are correlated and often activated together since dopamine is also linked to sexual arousal. So, speaking from a Biblical values perspective you don’t need to have sex before marriage to really create a strong basis for marriage. By refraining from pre-marital sex you’re not taking anything away from the future of your marriage; contrary to the idea that you need to be sexually intimate before marriage as part of testing things out, research shows that the best sex happens inside marriage.
Higher levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine are also linked to feelings of love in that it creates a sense of alertness and attention as well as the increased heart rate, blushing and trembling often experienced in the early stages of love[v]. These bodily sensations are reflective of a 'love storm' going on in your brain!
And here’s another fascinating piece: the early stages of romantic love shows a similar brain pattern to obsessive-compulsive disorder: both show significantly higher levels of the serotonin transporter 5-HT. This is thought to produce the obsessive thoughts and tendency to place a very high value on a specific thing/person that is found in both romantic love and OCD.
Fear is a frightening thing. In marriage, it is usually an invisible force. Like the winds of a storm: invisible itself but threatening and destructive. However, fear is always extinguished by the steady flame of committed love.
I think we all carry some fear in our hearts, at some level. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the more confidence you see in a person, the more likely they have fear issues. So this episode may be particularly relevant to those of us who feel that we really don’t need to hear it. I may just burst your bubble gently. Often confidence is a protective coping stance against the insecurity and fear that deeply troubles us. And nowhere are you more vulnerable to the effects of these fears than in your most intimate relationship: your marriage. Fears About Me or Fears About You? Most of us carry one or two kinds of fear. Either we have some level of fear that is really about ourselves: fear of rejection or fear of abandonment or fear of not being good enough, or fear of being unworthy of love and affection. These point at concerns within me and about me.
The other kind is fear about our spouse or significant people in our lives: fears of intimacy (afraid of letting people get too close to you) or fear of dependency (afraid to trust or afraid to count on other people). These are also fears that we carry within ourselves, but they are different from the previous in that they are indicative of our models of others.
So we all carry these models of self and models of others. Those are basic, nearly instinctive ways of relating to the humans around us based either on how we see ourselves or how we see other people. On the ‘other people’ part it’s about: are others reliable, are they trustworthy, can I depend on them. On the ‘self’ side it’s about am I worthy, am I lovable.
These are very deep but often when folks talk about them they use very simple language. For example, for me, I struggle most with the part of myself that asks the question: “if you saw me for who I am, would you still accept me?” The language is simple but the impact of that question touches the way I present myself in every social context of my life.
Another person may just say “I cannot trust others” or “people are just going to let me down”. Again: simple language, but this touches all of their social contexts and all their relationships too. We’ve looked before at issues of trust and why people may be unable to trust their spouse, and this attachment issue is often at the heart of it.
These deep fear constructs are indicators of our attachment style. Our attachment style is the way that we have learned to relate to the significant others in our life. Primarily our spouse, but it also impacts our children, our closest friends, and then to a lesser degree, our social network as well.
About half of the people are securely attached. That means they are secure in both themselves and their spouse: they believe themselves to be worthy of love and believe they can count on their spouse to love them and be there for them when they are needed.
The rest fall into three categories but we’re going to focus mainly on what we call avoidant attachment.
Those with avoidant attachment are insecure about the intentions of their spouse and they prefer to keep emotional distance in order to keep themselves safe. Often this comes across as coolness or distance or can even be interpreted as rejection. Usually, where one spouse is avoidant in their attachment style you’re going to see lower levels of intimacy[i]. If you aren’t sure your spouse is going to respond well to you, better to keep the really deep emotional stuff to yourself. See how this attachment style is about your view of yourself?
There’s also anxious-ambivalent attachment style which is more now about your view of your spouse — whether your spouse is actually like that or not. In this case, because of your view of others, you are not sure how your spouse will respond to you.
This one should be fun to look at as Verlynda and I personally sit on opposite sides of the field on this issue! But, as it turns out, there may even be some hope for folks like us!
It’s a classic scenario: you’ve got a free evening and one of you wants to go and hang out with friends and the other would rather curl up on the couch and watch Netflix. Or one of you is having the time of their life at a party and the other is secretly gritting their teeth through the entire thing.
When you have a marriage where one of you is introverted and one of you is extroverted it can seem like you’re on opposite wavelengths when it comes to how you spend your time, where your energy comes from, and how you make decisions and talk about important issues. If this is you, you may well be wondering if your differences along this dimension are going to impact your marriage. Can Introverts and Extroverts Get Along? I’m happy to say: yes! We can.
What I loved about the research on this episode is that it confirms what we suspected but it also has some very useful insights both for those who marry similar personality types AND those who marry other personality types.
A 2007 study[i] showed that similarity in the big 5 personality traits— those are the 5 traits researchers have identified as being the most fundamental part of our personalities, of which introversion/extroversion is one— predicted higher relationship quality. However, emotional similarity, which means experiencing and expressing similar emotions, was a strong mediating variable in this link.
So even if couples differ in personality, for example one is introverted and one is extroverted, they can still function well as a couple by being similar on an emotional level. This emotional similarity helps partners react to events in similar ways and feel understood by their spouse. That emotional connection is a deeper and more important predictor of happiness than similarity on a personality level.
So are introvert-extrovert marriages common? Generally, folks do not choose spouses with similar personality types. If you look at the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator (in which introversion-extroversion is one of the four dimensions), it is most common for couples to share two of the four parts and differ on the other two[ii]. We’ve looked before at whether opposites attract, and while it’s not a simple yes or no answer, there’s certainly plenty of evidence that very different people can have thriving, passionate marriage.
A small study based around that idea showed that differences in personality types were not linked to marital difficulty, and being opposites on introversion/extroversion specifically, did not predict any specific problems in marriage. Another study[iii] supported this finding — differences along the introversion/extroversion scale don’t negatively impact marriage quality in any noticeable way.
So it does look like introverts and extroverts can get along just fine. However, there was one interesting caveat. Moffit & Eisen[iv] found that levels of neuroticism and emotional instability for wives — but not husbands — were significantly linked to the degree to which the couple was apart on an introversion/extroversion scale.
So having one spouse who is highly introverted and one who is highly extroverted could lead to emotional instability for the wife. The mediating factor in this effect is thought to be communication: highly divergent couples showed lower rates of intimate communication and agreement, which may be the cause of the emotional strain the wives were experiencing.
Again: even if there is a big difference, it’s not a death blow to the marriage. Rather, it just requires that you step up your communication game. What Makes for A Happy Introvert-Extrovert Marriage? So here’s an interesting study[v] of 365 couples who reported they had happy marriages. They looked at the common characteristics of marriages where one spouse was extroverted and the o...
Now menopause isn’t something that I’m likely to experience but it is something that half of you are going to go through, or have gone through, and the other half will observe. And since it’s going to impact your marriage, we might as well be smart people and make sure we’re prepared for it!
Menopause can be a tricky time for marriages. Wives have to come to terms with changes in their body while dealing with all the hot flushes and night sweats life can throw at them. And husbands can often feel like they’re walking on eggshells trying to support their wives through unpredictable mood changes and other unpleasant side-effects.
The research shows that menopause can impact marriage in some surprising ways, but the overall picture is more nuanced, and overall more positive, than the simple perception that menopause = BAD. Menopause and Marital Satisfaction A survey of 326 midlife women[i] showed a significant negative correlation between marital satisfaction and menopause symptoms: as symptoms went up, satisfaction went down.
They also noted a correlation between menopause symptoms and feelings of anger and depression. As symptoms went up, anger and depressive symptoms increased too. However, they did note that married women reported fewer feelings of depression than non-married, suggesting that marriage guards against these feelings of depression. That fits with other research we’ve covered that shows that good marriages offer resilience against the challenges of life.
But the quality of your marriage is key: so if you’re listening today and not yet menopausal, this is another reason to work on your marriage! Check out what these researchers said: "Women in dissatisfying marriages, characterized by less social support, less depth, and higher conflict, reported increased stress and more menopausal symptomatology (symptoms such as sleep disturbance and vasomotor or blood circulation problems) than did women in satisfying marriages.[ii]”
So this is fascinating because now your marriage is impacting your menopausal symptoms. A supportive, stress-free marriage reduces the strain of menopause and makes the symptoms less severe and easier to deal with.
But menopause also affects one’s sex life. Menopause and Sex Life Satisfaction Menopause produces changes in a woman’s body, which may also decrease the enjoyment of sex: issues such as reduced libido, difficult orgasming and dryness in the vagina[iii]. However, these do not necessarily have to lower sexual satisfaction or the quality of your sex life. This merely becomes another life transition that couples go through and can learn to successfully navigate.
Follow me here.
A study by Deeks & McCabe in 2001[iv] interviewed 304 women aged 35-65. Menopause predicted higher rates of sexual dysfunction (inability to orgasm, reduced desire etc), but sexual satisfaction and frequency were better predicted by age than by menopause status.
Meaning that yes, complications came in, but it didn’t necessarily derail sexual satisfaction and enjoyment — for some it was getting better as they got older.
To understand this, we have to look at how couples going through this phase of life are facing the potential challenges of menopause. A study in 2003[v] interviewed 30 women about their sex lives post-menopause and found that "few women focused on menopausal changes when they discussed their sex lives".
Issues like relationship quality, communication and willingness to change sexual activities were more important. Many women with lower sexual satisfaction after menopause stated that this was due to their husband's reaction- for example complaining about their wives’ vaginal dryness or getting frustrated when the woman doesn't want to have sex because it is painful.
"These accounts suggest that some women continue to enjoy their active sex lives regardless of menopausal changes because they communicate openly with their partners and change the ways they have sex.
Suggesting that it is possible to porn-proof your marriage may appear to be preposterous. Porn is so prevalent in 2017 that it may be simply impossible to prevent yourself from seeing and coming into contact with pornography. However, what if you could build a marriage relationship and a shared worldview where pornography was not even attractive?
To begin with I want to clarify what we’re proposing, and who this is for.
You cannot walk through a mall, drive on a major highway, watch TV or use the Internet without being exposed to pornographic images. By ‘pornographic images’ I mean images capable of provoking sexual attraction, thoughts or fantasies. Such images are nearly impossible to avoid on a daily basis. That’s a sad but true commentary on our society's sexualization of women in particular.
So when I talk about porn-proofing your marriage, I’m not necessarily talking about living a life where you don’t ever come into contact with these images: that would be pretty much impossible. Which is sad. But what I’m aiming at is creating a marriage and a shared worldview where pornography holds no traction (there’s no grip) and no attraction (there’s no real desire to pursue it).
I also want to point out who this post is for and not for.
Who it is for: If you’re currently in the grip of pornography addiction, I hope you will find this useful. If pornography is not a factor in your marriage and you want to keep it that way: this is for both of you. If one or both of you are recovered pornography addicts then I believe this will be helpful as well.
Who it is not for: If your spouse is in the grip of pornography addiction and you want to single-handedly shape your marriage in order to out-compete or even just eradicate pornography than you’re probably coming at this the wrong way. This post is not really for you until you fall into the previous category.
You see, it’s not your job to manage your spouse’s recovery.
Your job is to both confront and refrain from enabling, and I think you should even go so far as to refuse to take responsibility for your spouse’s recovery. It’s the addict’s job to own all aspects of his or her recovery, not yours. We do have a previous post on steps you can take when you’ve just discovered your husband’s porn addiction, so that may be helpful for people in this situation.
Having said that, it’s not fair for you to choose movies with pornographic scenes while also holding the conviction that pornography is wrong, and expecting your previously- or currently-addicted spouse not to be triggered by this. I mean, if you’re comfortable with some pornography, then you should be comfortable with your spouse viewing some pornography too, right?
Finally, we should mention for those who are new to our website and podcast that Verlynda and I speak from a born-again Christian worldview. It is our belief that pornography does not have anything to add to your marriage because the Bible and even secular research both support the notion that the best sex is happening inside marriage. We could go a lot further explaining our beliefs and the theological underpinnings but I think that is an adequate summary for now. Pornography and Marriage Quality Let me cite some research relevant to pornography and marriage quality. Stack et al[i] noted that high marriage quality was linked to lower porn use. Another researcher[ii] also observed that satisfaction with real-life sex is not linked to rates of porn use (i.e., porn use is not compensating for lower satisfaction with sex, and increasing porn use is not equal to increasing sexual satisfaction). In fact, Poulsen et al[iii] showed that high levels of porn use lead to lower sexual satisfaction for both men and women.
A Barna Group study called the Porn Phenomenon also reported a number of other potential impacts of pornography, including:
A dramatic reduction in a spouse’s capacity to love their wife and children
Marriage can have some really, really tough times — maybe you’re in that mode right now — and have been for a while. You wonder: is this all there is? Does anyone really enjoy this? Or maybe your marriage is not horrible but it’s only just tolerable. Maybe steady but dull. You’re wondering if there’s more. Or perhaps you’re contemplating marriage but what you witnessed of your parents’ marriage leads you to continue to wonder: is it even possible to have a very happy marriage?
There is a mixed perception of marriage in western culture. On one hand, marriage is viewed as the "happily ever after" that everyone aspires to, on the other it is considered a restriction of freedom; being stuck with the same person for life and giving up on what you want in favor of what’s best for the marriage and the family. "These two competing visions of marriage- the wedding as a doorway to happiness and the wedding as an obstacle to individual growth- subsist side by side in contemporary American culture.[i]"
So we’re not all sold on this, right? We still wonder: does marriage actually make you happier? Does Marriage Make You Happier? I am very happy to say the answer is “Yes!"
Research almost universally shows that married people are happier than non-married, divorced or widowed[ii][iii][iv]. “Marriage has often been found to be one of the strongest correlates of happiness and wellbeing[v]”. One study[vi] of over 14,000 people over a ten year period found that marriage was one of the most important predictors of happiness.
Now before we get all giddy — we have to ask. Does marriage make you happier? Or is it that happier people are more likely to get married?
A study from 2006[vii] found that happier single people are more likely to opt for marriage. Uh-oh. However, in a 2014 study[viii] that controlled for pre-marital levels of happiness, it was still found that marriage will increase happiness over and above pre-marriage levels, suggesting a causal effect. So the evidence suggests that even if happier people tend to get married, marriage still causes an increase in happiness above what it was pre-marriage. Stats on Marriage and Happiness/Satisfaction So what about the stats on this? What are we looking at?
79% of married men and 81% of married women report being "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with life[ix]. This is higher than for those living together, or those who are single or divorced/separated.
40% of married people reported being "very happy" with their lives, compared to under 25% for single people[x].
I just want to the sidebar for one sec here — in case you happen to be single and reading a post on a marriage website— there are still nearly 1 in 4 people who are single and very happy. Yeah, it’s less than the percentage of married and happy. But don’t choose to stake your happiness on being married — because there are people who are not married and are still happy.
I just don’t want to leave anyone with the idea that if you’re single, you can’t enjoy life or if you’re single, you aren’t reaching a standard that the rest of us have who are married. It’s just different. It’s about what you make of it for your singleness as much as for those of us who are making something of our marriages.
I’m going to go over several factors that lead to happiness and joy in marriage. I’m just summarizing them here. If you want to learn how to take each of these to a deeper level, you’ll want to be sure to download the bonus PDF for this topic.
That file is available to our faithful patrons who support the ongoing production of our show by making a monthly commitment. These are folks who are truly serious about strengthening their own marriage as well as the marriages others — we’d love for you to go deep on this topic and also join our group of patrons in support of the work we do here through the Marriage Podcast for Smart People.
Finding the Joy in Your Marriage
However happy you are with your marriage currently,
One of the benefits of being a patron of The Marriage Podcast for Smart People is that you’re given the opportunity to request topics. One of our patrons asked us to address cross-cultural or inter-racial marriages. It’s an interesting area, with research showing that there are some common difficulties inter-racial couples face, as well as some real strengths they can draw from their different backgrounds and perspectives.
We should acknowledge at the start that we do address this issue from a place of white privilege — even though we have a bizarre last name, we are both white and so a set of privileges was defaulted to us at birth.
However, we have been studying this issue and want to bring some wisdom to those of you who are inter-racial couples. We’d also love to hear your feedback in the comments section below.
Interracial couples face challenges in their marriages that often find their source in issues that aren’t marital. Socioeconomic Differences For example. A study in 2006[i] looked at survey data for interracial couples and found a higher risk of severe distress compared to intra-racial couples (same race). What is interesting is that they noted that issues to do with socioeconomic status accounted for half of the variance.
So they concluded that one of the largest challenges in interracial marriages was to do with money and socioeconomic status. It’s an unpleasant fact about the western society that racial minority families are, on average, less well off than white families. So an interracial couple may be coming from very different economic backgrounds, which can create tension.
Another study along these lines[ii] pointed out that interracial couples have fewer resources available to them in terms of being able to share finances, possessions, and workloads due to this disparity in socioeconomic status. Tied to this was the observation that these couples may be less able to get support from their extended family due to the possibility of the family disapproving of the marriage, which could also add to marital strains.
I think the point here is that we all know financial issues put strain on marriage: but for interracial couples, the likelihood of experiencing this stressor is higher. Yet, in this, I also want to offer hope. Financial stress does impact your marriage: however, financial stress does not mean there’s something wrong with your marriage. To me, the question then becomes: how can we acknowledge this reality but have it become something we face together rather than something between us?
For those readers not from interracial marriages, that’s actually something you can use for your marriage too! If you want a bit of extra help we have a whole series of posts on marriages finances, with some useful info on topics like how to build a budget and how to reduce debt. Stigma There has been a stigma about cross-cultural marriage in society — probably forever. It was even illegal in many US states and in many countries — perhaps still is, in some. I don’t know.
This stigma and disapproval of cross-cultural marriage is an issue: in ways that those of us with intra-racial marriages may not even consider. For example, stigma may make it harder for interracial couples to show affection in public[iii] due to that fear of being judged.
Stigma can also affect you outside of public settings: think about families. More conservative families may dislike the idea of you marrying someone from a different race or culture. Older research suggests this stigma issue may even have a “Romeo and Juliet Effect” where parental or family disapproval actually works to increase feelings of love[iv]. However, most modern research shows the exact opposite: disapproval from your social network often leads to lower relationship quality[v].
So there’s this sense of isolation and disapproval from your family and from society in general. It’s possible that this could bring you closer together as a couple in a “you and me against...
This is a great question! Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just leave all the past behind, turn over a new leaf, and start afresh?
Most couples have problems and difficulties that they’ve been through and are trying to put behind them. Some of you might even have serious issues in your past that are still causing you pain and affecting your marriage today. And so you may be wondering if it’s possible to move on from difficulties in your marriage without bringing up all these issues again. Is it possible to leave past conflict unresolved and still have a happy marriage?
Turns out it’s not a simple “yes” or “no” answer.
For those of you that are new to the site, we speak to marriage issues out of a Christian worldview but what makes our approach unique is that there’s a ton of research in psychological journals that becomes part of our content.
So when we come to a question like this we aim to give you a very balanced, reliable recommendation that is going to truly help you move forward in your marriage. Because that’s our goal: to help you create thriving, passionate marriage. And if you are reading this it is probably because you don’t have that but you want it. And we want to help you get there! How Unresolved Conflict Impacts Marriage A good starting question is: can you have a happy marriage while leaving past arguments or differences unresolved?
It turns out that unresolved conflict does not appear to impact the duration of your marriage. But: it is negatively correlated to relationship satisfaction. Meaning that as the amount of unresolved conflict increases, it might not lead to the complete breakdown of your relationship but you’re probably going to become less satisfied with your marriage[i].
What is interesting is that this researcher then factored conflict out of the equation. You can do this with multifactorial analysis to pinpoint what exactly is causing the effect that you’ve observed. And when the amount of conflict (or frequency of arguments) was removed from the equation, the satisfaction still went down. Meaning that it truly is about the fact that things are left unresolved: this is the key factor, not the conflict itself.
But the researcher did have something to conclude about conflict styles: the more unresolved conflict, the more negative conflict styles were present. When higher levels of unresolved conflict were present in couples he observed more things like withdrawal during arguments, escalating small issues into arguments, etc. Which makes sense. Not dealing with stuff causes a buildup of pressure so that when things do spill over into an argument it’s going to be more extreme and all these other unresolved issues are going to get thrown in as well. Poor communication strategies are likely to follow. As another researcher put it: "To leave conflict unresolved is a risky course of action. An unresolved conflict could fester to the point of causing an explosion.[ii]"
So the evidence says: resolving conflict is better than leaving it unresolved. And I think most of us know that on an intuitive level: we have to deal with the things that just aren’t going away.
But: there is also some research to indicate that avoiding conflict (and even leaving things unresolved) may be a good idea if your conflict style is very negative and volatile. If you really do not have any functional, adaptable ways of resolving issues then you may need to contain the fallout. In that case, leaving things unresolved may be the lesser of two evils[iii].
That’s fine for the research to point out but I would still contend that if this is your situation it would be better to learn those skills. Read a book, get some counselling: do something to help you guys learn how to resolve conflict. I just cannot see this working out well in the long term even as I understand and acknowledge why it may be helpful in the short term. Avoiding conflict because your way of dealing with it is so destructive doesn’t sound like a health...
When it comes to PDA, or public displays of affection, what are you comfortable with? Holding hands? A light kiss? How about a passionate kiss at sunset on the end of a pier somewhere in Florida? Or is that starting to get gag-worthy?
PDA is often a touchy subject in married couples (pun intended -- my bad). But seriously, it can be difficult to find a level of public affection that you’re both comfortable with. Research has some interesting findings on the use of PDA, how it can help marriages, and some ground rules to bear in mind. If PDA Includes Sexual Behavior, That’s an Issue Ultimately this discussion of PDA is about what you each are comfortable with and how to work with that in your marriage. We want you to maximize the amount of affection you show and experience.
But there are limits here. There’s a line crossed from a public display of affection to a public display of sexual behavior. The former is a great way to show love to your spouse; the latter is not such a good idea.
I think there are some clearly sexual behaviors: touching your spouse’s private parts in public with your hand is sexual — that is indecent in any public context. That’s immodest. It is not respecting your spouse. It is objectifying your spouse in front of others. Think about it this way: intimacy is about vulnerability. The greater the vulnerability the greater the safety required. You can’t offer safety for this level of vulnerability in public. So if it’s not safe to be this vulnerable, don’t be that intimate.
But there is a grey area. For example, kissing. In North America, a kiss goes all the way from a peck on the cheek — that’s probably the most innocuous — to a full fledged French kiss where we have tongues playing tonsil hockey and so on. At this stage you have to respect a couple things.
First is your culture. Our podcast, at the time of recording, has been downloaded in 169 countries. In some of them, the peck on the cheek might earn you jail time or at least attention from a policeman if it was seen. In others, if you didn’t actually greet your spouse with this if you reunited in public (say, coming off an airplane) then your family would wonder what was wrong with your marriage and start worrying about the two of you. So keep your culture in mind.
The second comes back to sexuality. If your kissing is becoming sexual then we go back to the previous cautionary note about respecting each other and respecting the people around you. As the Bible says, “All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful” (1 Cor. 10:23). It might be legal. It probably isn’t helpful to anyone.
So let’s establish those two general guidelines: “is it sexual?” and “what does your culture allow?” as starting points. Now as we go through the research keep in mind that from now on we’re making the assumption that we’re looking at decent PDA.
Let’s actually look at PDA and relationship satisfaction because we want to be focusing on marriage. And then let’s look at factors affecting PDA inside each marriage, and then how to find the balance. PDA and Relationship Satisfaction The research shows that both private and public physical affection increase relationship satisfaction.
Expressing affection and love for your spouse through a variety of means is unquestionably a good thing. We’ve looked previously at the concept of the Five Love Languages, of which physical touch is one, but today’s research suggests touch is something everyone should be using.
Here are a couple of studies. First, Kent & El Alayi[i] surveyed women in committed relationships and found that they experience higher relationship satisfaction, relationship commitment and feelings of intimacy when private and public displays of affection were part of their marriage.
Most couples believe that physical touch is a good thing. That’s obvious to us but it’s not to everyone (we’ll get to that later) but "research has shown that individuals believe physical affection to serve a causal role...
Well, this should be a fun subject! There are a lot of factors that go into how household chores get divided up between husband and wife, and today we want to give you guidance as to how to do that without creating any unnecessary conflict or resentment.
Have you and your spouse ever had an argument over whose turn it is to do the dishes? Or do you ever resent your spouse for doing less around the house than you? Issues around the division of labor are common in most marriages and there’s a lot to unpack in terms of what society expects men and women to be involved with and what you each perceive as being “normal” or “fair”. And the research shows that it’s that perception of fairness that’s key to diving the work in a way that leads to a happy, distress-free marriage. Unequal Division of Household Work According to a piece of research by Breen & Cooke[i], husband’s contribution to household work is on average one third of the time that the wife puts in. This ratio, they claim, has persisted even with the increase in women having full time jobs and financial autonomy. Women still take most responsibility for, and spend the most time on, household tasks.
This is not due to any kind of power-struggle within the marriage and is not caused by different amounts of time available. "Rather, it is the non-conscious ideology developed from parental modeling that preserves traditional sex roles[ii]”. Meaning that women naturally end up doing more of the housework because that’s how things worked in their parent’s house and that’s still considered the norm in most of society.
So, do we have a gender inequality issue? I think that’s the question that we have to start with.
These researchers go on to say that we need to get past gender inequality. Women do more unpaid work around the house than men, irrespective of whether they work and the amount of time those women have available. And this often comes from expectations and from unacknowledged ideas about gender roles.
So, the researchers say, you need to work to balance this out.
But: not so fast.
Let me make a few points, and we have to keep all these points together. If you quote me on only one of them I’m going to sound like a liberal and the other, I’ll sound like a misogynist — we all know what that word means since the last US election, right?
I’d like to give a balanced perspective on this.
First, the Bible calls on husbands to live with their wives in an understanding way (1 Peter 3:7). The Bible puts the onus on us as husbands to be considerate.
I think a lot of guys don’t think through their own assumptions and don’t understand why their wife is disappointed about how chores get divided up. I want to challenge husbands to be the leaders in this discussion — not leading in the sense of authoritative decision making but leaders in the sense of facilitating an open, understanding, receptive discussion about how each of you feel about how fairly you divide up the housework and childcare.
So husbands need to be particularly considerate of the possibility that their wives are working harder than they are.
Equality vs Fairness
The next point to this section is that we also need to consider that there is a difference between equal and fair. I’m not talking about whether you and your wife are equals. You are. There’s nothing to discuss there. I’m talking about the equal division of labor vs. the fair division of labor.
An equal division and a fair division might not always be exactly the same. You may disagree on the equality of the division and feel that one of you does more than the other, including the outside work you do. Or you may agree on the equality of the division of labor but feel that it is unfair. For example, if Verlynda and I split hours of household 50/50 and I work outside the home and Verlynda doesn’t I might say, that’s equal household hours but to me, it still feels unfair.
The next couple, however, might be in the same situation but feel that thi...
Maybe today find yourself in that crazy busy time of life: raising toddlers. It’s that endless flow of diapers, trying to get kids to sleep properly, picky eating, piles of laundry, their boundless energy and so on and so forth. The question is: how do you even begin to create time and energy for your marriage in this stage of life?
I understand how this stage goes — dealing with the frayed nerves and seemingly endless to-do list that comes with having young children, while juggling other responsibilities like careers or the ever-increasing needs of elderly parents. And it makes sense that you’re reading this post because you know that the strain that this stage can impose on marriage is significant.
I’m glad you’re being proactive about it. Understanding the Toddler Stage of Parenting and Marriage It’s worth covering the typical scenario so you understand that your reality is normal and common and so you know you’re not alone.
This is often called the “Sandwiched” stage of life because in addition to caring for young children you may also be caring for parents. So you’re stuck between the two. Or even if your parents are able, the same issues apply.
We went through this a little younger but many people in this stage are in their mid 40’s, both are working full time, have 2 young children living at home, are also caring for 2 aging parents (usually with activities like shopping, transportation, housekeeping and money management). They spend about one working day a week caring for elderly parents, with the wife usually spending a couple more hours per week than the husband in this role[i].
This can definitely be a difficult time. Research shows that there are a number of possible negative consequences, including:
Greater instances of depressive symptoms in both husband and wife [ii] Greater conflict between work and home life[iii] Higher rates of burnout[iv] Decreased ability to save financially, such as for children's college fund[v] Difficulty finding time for yourself/spending time with your partner[vi] Difficulty maintaining a social life due to having to be constantly "on call"[vii]
Many sandwiched couples feel like they are caught in a "tug of war" with their time and energy being pulled in different directions. Often couples find that their own health suffers (in terms of getting enough sleep, time to look after yourself properly etc) and you end up putting your parents/children's needs first[viii].
So there’s a LOT going on. Lots of activity. Lots of responsibilities and only a finite number of hours in the day! Busy Doesn’t Mean Your Marriage is Doomed We’re going to talk about some specific coping strategies in a minute but I just wanted to stop and address this issue of busyness.
First of all make sure you check out episode 114, where we specifically look at the question, is it possible to have a hectic life and a happy marriage?
What you need to know is that just because your marriage is busy and you don’t have as much time for each other, that doesn’t mean your marriage is doomed.
I just want to make that point because it’s very easy to get into the place of seeing yourselves not have time for each other and starting to give meaning to that lack of time that is not actually valid. For example, you have less and less time, so you start to interpret that as your husband not caring. Or, your wife is always tired and exhausted so you start to internalize the belief that she isn’t interested in you any more, you’re not attractive, or whatever. And the reality is that your spouse's views of you or the marriage probably haven’t changed at all — this is just a busy phase of life!
But when you have these destructive beliefs starting to form, confirmation bias can kick in and then your brain is starting to gather evidence to confirm the belief. So the more you start to think something, the more you start seeing evidence for it and the more you end up believing it to be true.
What do you do when your marriage is absolutely at the end of the road? Is divorce your only option? Does separation ever help couples reconcile? And is there ever such a thing as a marriage that’s beyond recovery?
I’ve had a number of individuals reach out to me lately through our website saying that they are absolutely at the end of their rope as far as their marriage goes. They aren’t just whining or complaining. Some have been married for decades and the marriage has been very difficult for that entire time. They want out. But their value system tells them it’s wrong. If you are seriously considering ending your marriage there are some critical questions that you need to ask yourself first. Is It Ever Too Late to Save the Marriage? Let me start by saying that for our readers who are believers (born-again Christians), which is most of you, we don’t intend to get into the divorce and remarriage debate today. We just want to assert that God is pro-marriage, and so are we. That’s the core value that is driving the content of today’s post (and all of our content!). If you’re looking for someone who will justify the termination of your marriage for you, you’ll have to look to other resources.
Having said that we are not at all unsympathetic to the profound distress many of our listeners are experiencing in their marriage. We’re just pointing out that we want to take you in the direction of healing and recovery in your marriage.
So this is a great question. And there are a couple of things to look at.
One is the desire for reconciliation.
A study in 2011[i] interviewed divorcing couples and found that:
1 in 4 individuals indicated some belief that the marriage could be saved, even as they were going through the final stages of the divorce process Only for 1 in 9 couples (~11%) did both spouses have this belief 1/3 of couples were interested in external reconciliation services
This data seems to suggest that even as couples go through divorce, a reasonable minority still have some form of hope and belief that the marriage can be reconciled.
And so I think if you’re in the process of divorcing I hope you’ve taken the opportunity to ask your spouse this question: do you believe our marriage could be saved? If you get a flat “no” then you know where you’re at. If you get a “yes” it’ll probably be a “Yes, if…” or a “Yes, but…” and then a list of demands or things that need to change. And I would say for that discussion: don’t spiral off into an argument about what was said after the “Yes”. If you want to save your marriage and both you and your spouse believe it is possible, then surely it’s worth a shot?
Why not ask them if you can both take that “Yes” and then get some outside help to work on the “if” or “but” conditions. All those grievances and things that need to change are much easier to face if both of you want to get through them and both of you believe that it’s within the realms of possibility.
Another study from 2012[ii] interviewed couples going through a divorce. The most common reasons for divorce were “growing apart” (55% of couples) and not being able to talk together (53%). These factors decreased participant’s interest in the idea of reconciliation, as did differences in tastes and financial issues.
But there were other reasons cited for divorce that actually increased the interest in the possibility of reconciliation:
“Not getting enough attention” is an example. Presumably because in this situation you still want your spouse’s attention, you just feel you aren’t getting enough of it. “Problems with the in-laws” also predicted higher interest in the possibility of reconciliation.
Finally, being involved in abuse did not affect the desire to reconcile.
It’s interesting that these are all couples going through a divorce but the interest in the possibility of reconciliation is tied to some of the reasons why they were going for a divorce. It is really complex to try to tease all these a...
If I had a dollar every time a husband told me he wasn’t a very emotional guy, I’d be retired by now. But hey, I’m not judging. I used to think the same thing.
Turns out: it’s pure bunkum. And it’s messing up your marriage too.
It’s definitely a very commonly held view that women are more emotional than men. The stereotypical view is that women’s emotions are all over the place and they’re only too happy to let you know about it, while men are more muted; less extreme in their emotions and less willing to talk about how they’re feeling.
But the research on emotion and gender paints a rather different picture.
There are some differences around our ways of expressing ourselves, but nothing so drastic as being able to say that men “just aren’t as emotional” as women. Sorry, guys. Does Evidence Support the Idea that Women are More Emotional? We have to start by looking at our culture, and the subset of a culture known as emotion culture. Emotion culture is defined as a way of viewing emotions and their expression within society. It’s the unspoken rules and implicit assumptions that guide how we see and express different emotions. Unsurprisingly, these rules differ for women and men.
Part of western emotion culture then is the belief that women are “both more emotional and more emotionally expressive” than men[i]. Also it is widely thought that we differ in the emotions we feel and express: for example anger is a masculine reaction to things and sadness is more a feminine reaction[ii].
But does this commonly held view hold up to scrutiny?
A study by Simon and Nath[iii] used a questionnaire about daily emotional experiences for which they analyzed 1460 responses. They looked at:
The frequency of feeling emotions in general The frequency of reporting feeling different emotions (changing emotional state) Emotional expressiveness (how much expressivity happened)
They found:
No difference in the frequency of feeling emotions between genders. Men feel as frequently as women do. Some differences around which emotions are felt by men and women, but not a strong link. Often these differences were accounted for by differences in roles or situations. For example, women reported feeling negative emotions more often but this difference was accounted for by their lower household income. Men often reported feeling calm more often than women did, but when the effect of having children under 18 was removed, this effect disappeared. Men aren't naturally calmer than women--women are just less calm because they are dealing with the kids! Women DO express their emotions more readily than men. But the underlying level of feeling is not different.
Now you have visibility into emotion culture: humans all experiencing the same amount of feeling, but culture is dictating the extent to which you express it. We’ll unpack that more in a minute. I only cited one study. Let me drop a couple more in just so we know that we’re being fair in our consideration of the research.
Kring & Gordon[iv]: measured people’s emotions while watching film clips that were either scary, happy or sad. They observed participant’s facial expressions, self-reported emotional reaction and skin-conductance, which is part of the physiological or biological aspect of emotion.
They found no difference in self-reported emotions or skin conductance between men and women, but women were again more expressive with their facial expressions. Men were reporting feeling the same emotions as women, they just weren’t showing them externally. So again: male and female feelings were the same. Only women were more expressive of those feelings.
Another study: Lively & Powell[v]: looked at differences in expression of anger between men and women. Found that "social domain and status differences are such powerful predictors of emotion expression that they eclipse the influence of other individual characteristics, most notably the gender of both the individual and the target ...
So for a long time, I thought praying together was just a nice thing to do. It was one of those optional, lets-do-this-if-we-remember kind of things. But with time, my perspective on this has shifted. A lot.
Regular readers of the blog will know that we offer sound, research-based advice, as well as speaking from a Christian worldview. Even today when we’re looking at the effect of prayer on your marriage we’re referring to what we can learn from Scripture and from secular research because we believe that God also reveals truth in creation.
When I was coming to the research that had been prepared for this post I had in my head that we would only be looking at praying together, but there’s also some great info about praying for your marriage that I want to share as well. The research shows that both praying for your marriage and praying with your partner have some incredibly beneficial effects on your marriage. Prayer Increases Long-Term Marriage Satisfaction I wasn’t expecting this but it does make sense. It turns out that praying for blessings for your spouse predicts marriage satisfaction later in life[i]. So this study showed that who praying for the wellbeing of your spouse predicted relationship satisfaction at a later point in time.
The opposite was not true! Relationship satisfaction did not lead to an increase in prayer. So it was apparent that prayer is a catalyst to increase relationship satisfaction.
As the researchers considered this, they speculated that prayer encouraged spouses to think about the long-term aspects of the relationship. Here’s a quote: "Praying to an eternal and unchanging being and asking for positive things for my partner, may prime me to use a longer time frame in thinking about my relationship to my partner as well.[ii]"
That might be the case. I have a different idea. In 1 Peter 3:7, Peter is instructing husbands and he says, “Husbands, likewise, dwell with them with understanding, giving honor to the wife, as to the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life, that your prayers may not be hindered.” (NKJV).
Notice here that there is a prescriptive and behavior that Peter requires of husbands so that their prayers are not hindered. In other words, you have to behave a certain way, giving honor to your wife and understanding her, in order for your prayer to be effective.
I think this is also one of the ways that prayer impacts marriage. It puts back-pressure on your behavior. I know if I get to the end of the day and if I’ve been crusty with Verlynda or disrespectful towards her or have just been a jerk: I can’t pray. It just feels so fraudulent.
So one of the things I’ve noticed is that having a daily time of prayer together forces me to confront myself with my care for my wife and how I’ve related to her that day. I think that has a regulatory effect that challenges us to live— in both behaviour and attitude— in a way that allows us to arrive at the end of the day in a way that we can pray with authenticity. So of course that is going to have a positive effect on marriage.
There’s another part that this researcher noted: praying for your spouse also involves God in the marriage. Because of this, there’s a sense of accountability towards God which means both that I’m watching my behavior again, but also that I’m checking in on my commitment levels. And, as we discussed in episode 45, a top 5 predictor of marital success is commitment. So if praying for your spouse and your marriage increases commitment, that’s definitely something we want to be doing as well.
I’d like to issue a challenge on that note: do you pray for your spouse? And I mean, more than just “Father I pray for Verlynda and I pray for our dog etc etc”. Like you’re actually praying about stuff that matters to her and to you.
Further, these same researchers noted that praying FOR your spouse and praying WITH your spouse were highly correlated. So I know we’re talking about praying together but ...
This week we’re hitting a very specific moment that is occurring in many marriages; that moment when you discover your husband’s porn habit.
The revelation that your husband is addicted to some form of pornography is obviously a huge problem and a real shock to your marriage. But we're going to look at what the research says is the best way to deal with it in the immediate aftermath and how to look towards getting through it. We’re going to help you see what’s going on in his world, and then go through first steps towards recovery. We’ll be coming at that through two approaches: one if he is on board to get help and the other if he is in denial.
One quick preparatory comment: we’re going to be using the word ‘addiction’ quite a bit in this episode. Researchers can debate the definition of this word and Christians even more so. I want to skip that discussion for now simply because this episode is for wives whose world has just come crashing down around them and a ten-minute theological diatribe is not going to be helpful.
Discovering a porn addiction is an incredibly difficult thing to experience, often just as devastating as discovering an affair. Even if the problem is “just” online rather than in the real world, that same sense of betrayal, of being lied to, of a breakdown in trust, of repulsion, anger, and even fear are felt in response to this horrifying discovery. Wives may well wonder if their marriage can have a future after discovering that their trust has been violated on such a deep level for such a long period of time and angry thoughts of revenge are common. Defining Porn Addiction Let me give you a definition that can be used to help understand what’s going on for your husband and will give us a basis for what we need to go over today. I also want to say that while my main specialty is marriage therapy, my second most experienced area of work is with pornography recovery. Also, this problem, unfortunately, has been a part of the history of our marriage and so Verlynda and I will be drawing out on our own respective experiences too.
Addiction is "when a person compulsively uses sex to alter his or her mood to produce pleasure and/or to provide an escape from internal discomfort and is employed [or, entrenched] in a pattern characterized by recurrent failure to control the behavior and continuation of the behavior despite significant negative consequences[i]".
I like that definition for a few reasons:
It identifies why your spouse is engaging in this behavior. Not for the purpose of justifying it but helping us to understand: he’s using porn to alter his mood and/or escape. This is important because there is a valid need and an invalid coping mechanism at play. Your husband has a desire to feel better or escape from the pressures of his life, which is normal but has turned to a very unhelpful way of meeting that need. If we want the invalid coping mechanism (the porn) to go away, we have to also take care of the valid need in a healthy way. It also points out the recurrent pattern: this could be daily, weekly, monthly, even quarterly. There’s a recurring pattern here. And it also highlights the fact that at some level, even on the verge of his awareness, he knows there are significant negative consequences to his behavior. Why doesn’t that stop him? That’s a separate discussion where we would have to look at addictive cycles and come back to that valid need.
Keeping a Healthy Perspective If you’ve just discovered his porn addiction, it will probably be a real shock and there will be all kinds of feelings going through you. To help you get a handle on the situation there are a few things you need to know.
The first is that you’re not alone. This is a profoundly common problem but also one that carries a lot of shame for both husbands and wives. Because of that, it doesn’t get talked about. Usually, couples that go through this go through it feeling very alone and without sharing it with others.
Did you know that 89% of veterans experiencing PTSD report one or more kinds of sexual dysfunction? And that survivors of childhood sexual abuse have a very common set of negative feelings and beliefs about sex? That’s the bad news.
The good news: your marriage can become a place to help heal trauma — even through what happens in your most intimate moments.
In our previous post we asked whether trauma might be having an unseen impact on your marriage, and how you can identify and begin to heal this issue. Previous trauma can have a major impact on a marriage by damaging your ability to trust and open up to your spouse. It can also have a major impact on marital sexuality.
Like last week, we’re not trying to encourage anyone to make up something that isn’t actually there. But I believe that trauma is impacting more of our marriages than many of us realize. And one area the symptoms are particularly evident in is the area of sexuality.
We’re going to start by looking at how trauma impacts female and male sexuality individually. And then we’re going to show you how to improve your sexual relationship directly.
If trauma is affecting your situation or even if you don’t have any trauma that you’re aware of, the last half of today’s post is going to have some very useful teaching on becoming more conversant about your sexual relationship. How Trauma Impacts a Wife’s Sexuality Unfortunately, a common cause of trauma in women is childhood sexual abuse. And although this also happens to men, we do have a very useful study from 2012[i] that specifically looks at the impact of childhood sexual abuse on women’s sexuality.
Based on their review of the research, this study found that trauma impacts women’s sexuality in the following ways:
"Women with a history of CSA report more negative feelings about sex and experience less sexual satisfaction than do non-abused women[ii]”. I want to be clear: this is normal. I know when statements like this are made it’s easy to put yourself in the “damaged goods” category. But that’s not what this is about. It’s really helpful when we’ve been through something profoundly difficult like trauma to know that we’re not alone in our struggles. Finding out that this is a normal experience should normalize it. So you’re not crazy, you’re not the only person like this. The good news is that there is hope and recovery. So just stay with me here. The first take-home point is that it’s not uncommon to report more of these negative feelings.
Next, “Forming intimate adult relationships is often difficult” for survivors, and “when relationships are formed, sexual and emotional fulfillment is often lacking[iii]”. So if you’re listening today you may be listening because you want more from marriage — more from your relationship with your husband. That’s great!
Research has found that the most common sexual difficulties in survivors are “disorders of desire, arousal, orgasm, and less often dyspareunia (painful sex) and vaginismus[iv]”. Vaginismus is the term given to recurring, involuntary tightening of the muscles around the vagina whenever penetration is attempted, making sex difficult or impossible. So these are common issues that female trauma survivors face in the context of married sexuality. What causes these sexual difficulties? That’s a good question to ask. One common underlying factor is often that survivors of sexual abuse have been found to have "more negative self-schemas [ways of thinking about self] than non-abused women[v]". When psychologists talk about schemas they are referring to our core beliefs- the things about ourselves and the world which we hold as irrefutably true. You can imagine that in intimacy when these deeply held negative ways of thinking about yourself are the dominant stories, it’s going to have an effect. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your husband thinks you are — you just can’t see yourself any other way. These messages are the main headlines running through you...
Do you ever get the sense that an unseen force is at work in your marriage? I’m not going all woo-woo on you here, but what if you could identify that force, understand it, and then use your marriage as a place of healing?
If you've been through some kind of deeply traumatic experience then it's perfectly reasonable to expect that it will have had some effect on you as a person. But trauma can also have a big impact on your marriage, often without you even knowing. How big of a deal is trauma? I wanted to examine this because I see it at play in a lot of marriages and I am hoping that by reading this you will be able to self-evaluate your circumstances to see if this is relevant or helpful.
Trauma has different definitions and can be caused by many different things. Experiences such as childhood illness or hospitalization, near death encounters or experiences where death is witnessed, accidents, extremes like genocide and war, rape or torture are all examples of situations where trauma may result. Basically any deeply distressing or disturbing experience can result in trauma. Often you’ll see this where a person’s ability to cope is simply overwhelmed and you end up feeling powerless.
What’s interesting about trauma is the rule of nine. If you have events on a scale where zero is not a big deal and nine is witnessing something really terrible, the rule of nine is about how there are different figures you can multiply together to get to nine. If you experience one incident at a nine level of intensity you can have trauma as a result. Or you could also get it from having three incidents at a three-level; none of the incidents on their own would be big enough, but they add up together to a traumatic experience. Or even nine events that are a one level of intensity, where you have repeated exposure to something “small” that’s not big enough by itself, but by repeated exposure, it works up a trauma response.
So trauma ends up being the emotional response you carry to a very negative event or series of events. Trauma is a normal reaction to painful or difficult experiences but it can impact your ability to cope with normal life. And it can also have a major effect on your marriage. How Trauma Impacts Marriage A study from 2000[i] looked at 96 couples where at least one spouse reported a history of childhood abuse. Of course, that would be a likely source of trauma. These couples exhibit some particular attributes. So we’ll look at what these are and then why they appear, and then examine how we can help heal this.
This study made a few observations. First, if one or both spouse reported a history of physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood the couple was more likely to experience lower relationship satisfaction and higher individual stress symptoms than couples where neither spouse reported an abuse history. This is why we are dealing with the subject of trauma: it can impact marriages for sure!
They also noted that couples with a history of childhood abuse scored lower on cohesion than non-abuse couples. Cohesion is about the closeness of the couple- the emotional bonds they share. So there is more distance experienced in marriages where childhood abuse has been part of one or both spouse’s history.
It is common for individuals who have experienced abuse to report that they experience emotional distance and isolation. So yes, this definitely has the potential to touch marriages. If you’re reading this and it feels familiar, just stay with me though: we have good news for you later on. Why Does Trauma Affect Marriage? We’ve talked about attachment before — the science of love or the love bond that exists between two spouses. Trauma impacts attachment and, related to that, one’s ability to be emotionally engaged.
Let’s talk about some examples of what this looks like based on the work of Johnson and Williams-Keller[ii]. By the way, this is Sue Johnson who has really pioneered EFCT— the approach to couples’ therapy that ...
Is this just a Christian myth? Is the idea that the best sex occurs within marriage something that is only believed by church-going people? What does the research say?
If you’re struggling with your sex life we offer sound, research-based advice, and today, hope for a constantly improving sex life too. Today we’re going to be looking at why the best sex happens inside marriage. Actually, it’s hard to believe that going through a bunch of research might be arousing but today we’re going to take a crack at it. Why Sexual Boundaries Are A Good Thing We’re going to do something very deliberate today: we’re not going to refer to the Bible at all. Now if you’ve just started reading our posts you need to know that Verlynda and I are born again Christians who are very involved in our local church and we always think and write out of our Christian worldview. We often refer to Scripture as well as to research. And today could definitely be a Bible-thumping episode. In the New Testament, there are only a handful of epistles that refrain from addressing sexual sin, from lust to fornication to adultery. So that message is clear.
And I think that a lot of people, perhaps from more agnostic or atheistic backgrounds, look at Christianity and see it as being very prudish because of these restrictions. Like we’re missing out.
But I think it’s actually very much the opposite: the sexual revolution of the 1960s to 1980s has actually done more to erode the quality of sex that people are experiencing than to enhance it. It’s telling that just now, in 2017, we’re starting to see articles in the New York Times and Washington Post raising the alarm over pornography use and its detrimental impact on male sexuality. This is nearly 50 years after the first adult erotic film had a wide theatrical release in the USA.
Where culture has got this backwards and impressions are still inverted is that God put boundaries around sexuality to increase the amount of pleasure and sexual satisfaction that can be experienced, not to decrease it.
And we’re going to demonstrate this from the research today. At the end I’m going to tell you why this is important to your marriage, and to ours, of course. What Statistics Say About Sex Within Marriage Overall, research tends to support the idea that the best sex happens within marriage. Let’s start with a study from 2000 by Christopher and Sprecher[i] which compared sex within marriage to sex within dating and cohabiting relationships. They found that married couples generally reported being satisfied with their sexual relationship. They cited a study where 88% of married couples reported being “either extremely or very pleased in their [sexual] relationship”
88% Rockin' It
What I think is really cool is the words that these same extremely pleased or very pleased married couples used to describe how they felt about having sex: loved, thrilled and excited.
So not only are married couples typically satisfied with their sexual relationship but Scott and Sprecher also showed that studies have found that married individuals are more satisfied with their sexual relationship than single and cohabiting individuals. This was particularly the case for monogamous married respondents. So it’s not just being married that’s the key, but being monogamous in marriage too— can’t make any assumptions here since the Sexual Revolution.
So this is great: sex is better within marriage. But why?
Again, we could go to the Bible and argue that it just makes sense because God is good, and He designs us to flourish when we are obeying him. And of course, that’s very true. But instead, let’s go to the research again and see what these researchers are observing.
I was originally thinking of coming up with an inflammatory title for this post like “Chapman’s Love Languages Debunked” because that makes for good clickbait on the internet!
But this is The Marriage Podcast for Smart People and I figured, well, smart people are going to see that I’m just trying to create hype. And my mission is to help marriages, not create hype. So we’re actually going to look at research that examines the validity of the 5 Love Languages Concept and challenge you on how you might be using or abusing this concept in your marriage.
We have an exciting post for you this week. Today we’re going to be talking about Gary Chapman’s famous book, the 5 Love Languages. Now, the premise of the 5 Love Languages is that everyone has one single primary way in which they prefer to receive love and one secondary way. The five options are:
Gift giving Quality time Words of affirmation Acts of service (devotion), Physical touch
The idea is that once you discover what yours and your spouse’s love languages are you’ll be better able to give and receive love in a way that resonates with them. This concept has been widely accepted in mainstream thought and seems particularly popular in the Christian world. But the purpose of what we do is to offer sound, research-based advice, which sometimes includes questioning popular ideas. Most of all, we offer hope and because we tell you what actually works in marriage.
So I’m working from the assumption that Gary Chapman is a brother in Christ and I have no desire to cut him up or attack his reputation. Where we’re coming from today is we’ve noticed a number of occasions in marriages now where the 5 Love Languages has actually been counterproductive to the health of the marriage. While it’s nice to put yourself in a box, we’ve seen it become an issue in a number of ways. So we want to look at what works, what doesn’t, and give you some research and some points to consider before you swallow the whole 5 Love Languages idea hook, line and sinker. Is There Empirical Support for the 5 Love Languages? If you look on the Wikipedia article it’ll say right away that there’s some question as to whether Gary’s concept can be empirically validated. Well, we’re happy to tell you some researchers have taken up the challenge. In 2006, Polk and Egbert[i] set out to determine if the claims made in Chapman’s book could be supported through an empirical study.
They took 86 couples and asked them to pick one of the five languages that best described the way they prefer to receive love. So these folks each had to pick their primary love language. Then they had to complete two surveys: how they preferred to receive love and how they preferred to give love. They also used a standardized assessment called the Quality of Relationships Inventory to measure the quality of these relationships (this is the non-Chapman part of the study).
Following this they bunched the people into three categories:
Match: both spouses gave and received in their preferred Love Language. The way they gave and received love in their marriage was perfectly complementary. Partial match: only one spouse received his/her preferred Love language. Mismatch: neither spouse received their preferred Love Language.
Here’s what the researchers found, for and against Chapman’s ideas.
There was no correlation between the survey regarding how you preferred to receive love and your actual perceived preferred love language. In other words, if I said “choose one of the 5 Love Languages as your preferred one” and then gave you a detailed survey that asked 20 questions to help determine the same there would be no statistically dependable matchup between the two.
What you think your Love Language is when you pick one vs. trying to measure this by looking at what you actually do to express love and maintain your relationship doesn’t match up.
There are a few possible conclusions.
How would you react if you found out that your spouse was cheating on you? No doubt it would be a severe shock and you would find yourself filled with anger, surprise, sorrow and all kinds of other emotions. In fact, research shows that the effect of discovering infidelity is so severe it can be likened to recovering from a life-threatening traumatic event.
Today we’re going to be looking at something many wives experience following the disclosure of infidelity which is basically PTSD with a twist. If you’re struggling with your marriage after infidelity then today’s sound, research-based advice, should bring you hope.
A guy called Dennis Ortman literally wrote the book on this in 2005. It’s not a well-researched subject area since it is relatively new. However, this is definitely something I have observed and it is very real[i].
So Ortman noticed that many of his clients who had experienced infidelity within their marriage showed similar patterns of stress in response to the betrayal. I don’t have a reference for this but I remember when I was studying for my masters in the late 2000’s I came across one article that pointed out that 60% of wives who were sexually betrayed shows all but one of the symptoms of PTSD. And Ortman noticed that these spouses he was working with also mirrored the criteria for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
But: it’s worth noting that one of the diagnostic criteria for PTSD is that you have to have witnessed severe bodily harm or death. And of course that doesn’t apply here but he was seeing that all of the other criteria were being met.
So while traditionally understood PTSD would occur in response to witnessing something deeply traumatic and violent, in PISD there is no life-threatening event but the deep impact of the betrayal leads to similar symptoms, including:
Experience of intense fear, helplessness, or horror: Individuals who have experienced infidelity become overwhelmed by feelings of fear, helplessness, and horror when they remember the affair. They live with a constant feeling of helplessness and fear that it will happen again[ii]. Re-experiencing of the event: Victims of infidelity “relive the horror of the event and all the overwhelming feelings, sometimes years later.” Just as a war veteran may duck at the sound of gunfire or have flashbacks of traumatic moments that happened long ago during war, “victims of adultery relive the painful discovery of infidelity[iii]”. Avoidance of reminders of the event: Victims of infidelity “cope by trying to forget the terrible things that have happened to them by avoiding thoughts, feelings, or conversations associated with the trauma[iv]”. Emotional numbing: Victims of infidelity “become so overwhelmed by their feelings of anxiety, rage, and helplessness that they attempt to cope by withdrawing into an emotional cocoon...They detach from life and from themselves to survive the emotional storm[v]”. Heightened anxiety: Victims of infidelity, “live on high alert for recurrence of the [infidelity].” They struggle to sleep and often have nightmares[vi]. Irritability and rage: “Individuals who have been traumatized become preoccupied with how they have been victimized, which causes them to become angry with the perpetrator, with life, and with themselves. At some level, they blame themselves for allowing the trauma to occur. Consequently, they are often irritable and experience temper outbursts[vii]”.
Why Can Discovery of an Affair Cause Such a Strong Reaction? The main reason I see for this is that an affair or a betrayal of this magnitude is an incredible blow to the marriage bond. Discovering an affair or discovering porn or sex addiction is a betrayal of trust that shakes your belief in your most important relationship and leaves you feeling vulnerable.
Trust is a fundamental component required for a marriage in order to flourish. Think about it: if you had everything going great in your marriage except for trust,
Today’s episode is twice the challenge: we’re dealing with the difficult subject of abuse in marriage but we’re also talking about when to leave a marriage too, which, under normal circumstances, is contrary to our personal values and our mission to help save marriages. So read carefully and thoughtfully as we navigate this very difficult topic.
Today we’re going to be guiding you through this subject of when to leave or stay in an abusive marriage.
If you missed last weeks’ post we discussed trajectories of healing and recovery for abusive marriages. You’ll definitely want to check that out for some background to today’s episode if this is the first time you’re listening in Also, make sure you hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss any upcoming shows from us.
Let’s get into this topic by starting with our values and then going to some really interesting research.
I think the most important thing we need to keep in front of us and for our readers to bear in mind is the context in which we are writing. We are sitting here in Florida writing this from our travel trailer. But when we publish this episode it will be available in over 100 countries and will be downloaded thousands and thousands of times. We have people of all faith backgrounds that read our posts. And even when most of our readers are evangelical Christians we have a spectrum of opinions on the subjects of separation, divorce and remarriage.
Rather than going into a huge sidebar on that I’m just going to say this. Our mission is to save marriages — we want to reach and influence as many marriages as possible. We hope your marriages never comes under this kind of strain and believe that no marriage is beyond recovery. We have written previously about certain exceptions to this and whether genuine ultimatums are ever justifiable in marriage, and while we still believe that separation is not the ideal from a Christian standpoint, when we talk about abusive marriages we are dealing with a whole different ball game.
You may well have your own opinions on whether divorce is ever acceptable. I would just ask that if you are not in an abusive marriage and if you have never been close to someone who is on the victim side of that relationship, that you suspend judgment until you hear some of their stories and experiences.
On the other end of the spectrum, we will have women listening to this who are facing another beating today. In this very moment, they are afraid — possibly even for their lives. So we have this wide audience reading but we really want to speak to those of you who are in an abusive marriage and are trying to figure out what your next step is and are maybe even afraid for your life, certainly for your wellbeing and possibly that of your children also. Should I Leave My Abusive Marriage? Let’s start with a very interesting study from 2007[i] where the researchers collected data from over 400 women who were seeking help due to being in a violent relationship. They interviewed these women every 3 months for the next year.
These women had four patterns of relationship that the researchers identified
Completely apart: the women remained uninvolved with their partner from the second interview to the end of the study Together then apart: women who were “in” the relationship with this partner for at least one-time point [during the first 6 months of the study] but were “out” of the relationship [during] the last 6 months of the study Fluid: women who were involved with their partner for at least a one-time point [during]…the last 6 months of the study, but were “out” of the relationship for at least a one-time point between the second interview and the end of the study. Completely together: women who remained involved with their partner for the entire study
Where this study is helpful is it showed how women fare in an abusive relationship based on their decisions to stay, leave or live out some combination of the two.
Will the abuse get better?
Or is it going to stay the same?
Abuse is deeply rooted in belief systems and so we want to talk about recovery rates and how to figure out if you might consider sticking things out or if there is no hope for your husband.
Today we’re going to be looking at what the research says about trajectories of abuse. Meaning: if you learned from the last episode that you are in an abusive relationship, what hope is there for change?
So last week we looked into how to know if you’re in an abusive marriage or just a distressed marriage, and at ways of defining the different forms of abuse. Be sure to give last week’s post a read. What Research Says About Trajectories of Abuse A study from 2008[i] looked at physical and emotional aggression and measured them using the Domestic Conflict Inventory— a tool for measuring conflict in marriage that includes elements of physical and emotional aggression which we describe in our previous episode.
They looked at 118 couples and found that:
Physical aggression significantly decreased over time (43% per year) Emotional aggression did not significantly change over time. They actually found that husbands showed a 3% increase per year. Just note that this means that 3 or 4 or of the men out of the 118 couples changed. Longer duration marriages had lower physical aggression.
What we are seeing is that research tends to support these results. Physical aggression changes over time — often decreasing — but emotional aggression tends to remain stable over the years.
Another study from 1996[ii] found that even when the husband’s physical abuse decreased over a 2 year period the same was not true of emotional abuse. The frequency of emotional abuse remained stable even as the physical abuse decreased.
Now, for men that get involved in batterer programs and seek help, more recent research shows that these programs can be effective in helping them reduce aggressive comments and helping them communicate more positively during arguments. Not all batterer programs offer this kind of skills-based training but this does help reduce verbal abuse, but the researchers also noted that good communication skills need to be taught to both the man and the woman to be most effective[iii].
Another thing that is worth noting here is that the abuse interventions need to be seen as an ongoing process, not just a one-time cure[iv]. So men who successfully stopped being violent towards their spouses often stated that they were violent due to patterns of behavior learned from their parents. Or they were violent because it helped them feel more “masculine” and in control. So violence and abuse are deeply engrained into this type of thinking as you might image.
Consequently, you can’t shift this in one intervention.
The change in thinking and beliefs is most successful in men who continually engaged with counseling and intervention such as batterer programs. The men reported that they would sometimes “forget” the right ways of coping with situations when in the moment but that long term interventions helped them become more aware of their own motivations in being abusive, which helped them towards change.
What I hear when I look into this kind of research is that your husband will do best when he considers himself to be on a journey of self-discovery and personal growth.
This, obviously, is going to look very different than him just apologizing, even being tearful, promising he’ll never do it again, and then not actually engaging in any process to help him recover. A tearfully apologizing husband may mean every word he says and genuinely want to change, but that in-the-moment remorse is rarely enough to change long-standing patterns of thought and behavior. So just keep that in mind as you gather evidence about what kind of a trajectory he is on. How Many Abusive Men Recover? The answer to this question depends a lot on the type of abuse being perpetrated.
Abuse is such a tough situation. We want to speak to all the brave wives out there who are putting on the mask every Sunday and acting like things are OK when every week you live through a cycle of walking on eggshells, explosions, the honeymoon stage and then starting all over again. But abuse isn’t always as obvious as physical threats or violence; there are lots of subtler— but equally damaging— forms abuse can take.
We have a sad but necessary topic for you this week. For the next few episodes we’re going to be looking at abuse in marriage. Today we’re starting with the question, Is My Husband Abusive?
I think one of my biggest fears coming to a topic like this is that there are a lot of times that the “abuse” word gets thrown out there to describe stuff that really isn’t. And there are a lot of times when something should be called abuse and it is not.
We wanted to take this first episode to really help you go through these issues if you think it might be your situation — before we start talking about how to get help in our next episode. One of the things we put together for this episode is an assessment tool so that you can go through a specific set of questions and then evaluate your relationship to see if your husband is abusive. We’ll look at about how you can get hold of that later on.
As you might expect, abuse gets categorized in a number of different ways. I often like to point out that in the simplest terms that when you’re dealing with an abusive situation it’s to do with issues of power and control. You do need both of those things, not just one. There are a lot of us who struggle with anxiety who try to exert a lot of control on the world around us to try to help reduce the uncertainty — that’s an anxiety problem, not an abuse problem. And there are power struggles in marriage too — probably for most of us — but that doesn’t constitute abuse by itself either.
So let’s lay out some groundwork here about the types of abuse in marriage. Types of Abuse in Marriage I think it’s good to look at physical versus non-physical abuse. I’ve actually encountered wives experiencing physical abuse and they didn’t recognize it as such because not all forms of physical abuse look like a balled up fist.
Physical abuse includes any type of violence. Going from least to worst seriousness, this can include:
Throwing something with the intent to hurt or intimidate Pushing Grabbing Shoving Slapping Pulling hair Choking Hitting with an object Attempting to drown Beating Threats or use of a weapon such as a knife or gun[i].
In addition to that researcher’s definition I would include blocking, acting threatening or intimidating by posturing physically. Types of Non-Physical Abuse Non-physical abuse can be more difficult to identify. I want to pause here to make one point. A few years ago I came across my first situation where I had a wife asking for help with abuse. To help me make sure I was brushed up on the topic I consulted with a therapist who has written a book on the subject. During my consultation with this therapist and author, she mentioned the case of a woman who had been stabbed several times by her husband, rolled up in a rug and left in a field to die. The woman survived and her words were: the stabbing was awful, but his words hurt me more than anything else.
I think for a lot of us that have been blessed to grow up in safe families where there was no physical violence we often think of the worst kind of physical abuse as being the batterer. And I don’t want to discount that at all. But I just want to raise the point that non-physical abuse is incredibly brutal too, and should not be belittled. The old playground epithet that “sticks and stones may hurt my bones but words never do” is a bunch of baloney, especially in an abusive context. Just keep that in mind if you’re just beginning to learn about abuse.
There are four categories of non-physical abuse described in one of the journal...
I find it’s pretty easy to avoid conflict. I kind of stockpile the issues until it gets really big and then I feel like I’m ready to talk. But the irony is: that’s actually when I’m least ready to talk. As soon as I open my mouth I know it’s not going to go well. So if avoiding conflict and bottling everything up until I burst isn't the answer, is there a better way of approaching conflict?
We have an intriguing topic for you this week. Today we’re going to be looking at one of those things we are all doing wrong in marriage: avoiding conflict.
I know that sometimes I find myself cataloging a list of issues I want to bring up with Verlynda. And then I kind of realize this is going to come out as way too much at once. It’s like we villainize the other person and adopt this belief that they won’t hear us unless we have a really exhaustive list of how bad they are. Or like we have to build up a comprehensive “case” against them, rather than just addressing each small thing as it arises, or our points will be rejected as being too “small” or “petty”. Avoiding Conflict Leads to More Conflict I want to start by asking you to consider whether you might have an avoidance orientation in your relationship.
An avoidance orientation just means that you attempt to avoid conflict during conversations. A study from 2015 observed that couples who have this style of relationship often experience “communication difficulties and the perpetuation of avoidance [1]”
They studied 365 couples and found that if you’re more avoidant, you’ll be more reactive to your spouse’s negative behavior. So avoidant spouses are more likely to explode when they are having difficult discussions because they’ve been bottling up issues and resentments for so long that eventually the dam just bursts and it all pours forth.
So basically if you think that avoiding tough topics and just keeping things calm is a good idea, the research shows- and your experience probably resonates with this- that avoiding these issues actually leads to less productive discussions when you actually start talking about what matters. As we said in an earlier podcast episode: talk about it sooner before it's a big deal.
Crucially, the study found that this was independent of relationship satisfaction and neuroticism. This is important to note— firstly because it doesn’t matter about how good or how poor your marriage is, avoidance is still not helpful. Secondly, when they say it is independent of neuroticism they are saying this is not about one spouse being a nutcase. This is not one person’s fault. It’s simply a matter of a technique that you’re using in your marriage that just doesn’t work.
Of course, I get why we do this. We want to keep the peace. We don’t want to upset our spouse. We don’t want to rock the boat. We say things like, “Happy wife, happy life” and if that means keep silent and don’t complain, that’s what we do. Does that sound like a God-filled marriage?
All over the Bible, we are told both to forgive and to exhort each other. In Ephesians, we are told to speak the truth in love. In Colossians, we are told to teach and admonish one another in all wisdom. Gary Thomas talks about this in his book, Sacred Marriage, and he points out that the purpose of marriage is to make us holy, not make us happy. When we avoid topics we need to be talking about, we are thwarting one of the purposes of marriage: personal growth and sanctification.
Conflict isn’t fun. But: it leads to forgiveness, where avoidance does not. And, if done in the right way, it leads both you and your spouse closer to God’s ideal view of your marriage. Why Do Couples Avoid Conflict? Before we go to the “how to” of stopping this bottling up of stuff in our marriages, let’s take a look at why we avoid conflict in our marriages.
There’s a number of reasons why we do this. Research has shown that:
Poor marital satisfaction (not being happy and almost preferring to keep evidence rather than challen...
What do you do when you want to spice up your sex life? We usually start thinking about new positions, or lingerie or maybe traveling to some exotic location with our spouse. Physical things. But what if the key to great sex was found in a completely different dimension?
Sexual Experience Types & Attachment The research we’re looking at today will actually have a profound impact on the whole scope of your married life. So this is definitely going to be a pivotal topic for many couples who are reading. We are going to talk about attachment. I know that sounds like something to do with velcro but attachment in the science of relationships is simply about the love bond between two people. So every time you read “attachment” just think “love bond” so that this new term doesn’t throw you off.
What we’re going to see is that the quality and nature of your attachment to your spouse has the largest impact on your sexual satisfaction. If you’re in a sexless marriage, or you have a lot of conflict about sex, it almost always comes back to this attachment issue. The only exception would be if there is a genuine sexual disorder such as erectile dysfunction or vaginismus— those may be related to physiological issues or they may find their root in other things like childhood sexual abuse. But: if you solve the attachment issue you’ll also have a safe place to talk about these other issues, and I would certainly recommend you do so with a qualified sex therapist.
We will look at how attachment affects different ways of experiencing sex, and finish with a look at 7 steps to growing a secure attachment in a sexual context. Three Experiential Patterns of Sexual Intercourse The first thing you need to know is that both men and women experience sexual intercourse in one of three patterns:
Relationship-centered orientation: This pattern is all about being connected to your spouse on an emotional level during sex. So it is about the “individual’s feelings of being loved and esteemed by one’s partner and the desire for partner’s involvement, as well as the sense of being the subject of love (i.e. feelings of love toward the partner, and attentional and emotional focus on her/his needs and reactions.) [i]” This is healthy, whole-person sex that encompasses both physical and emotional experience and is focused on both giving and receiving from your spouse.
Worry-centered orientation: This pattern revolves around a focus on you and your own worries over giving and receiving from your spouse. This includes worry about "the personal vulnerability and sense of estrangement related to sexual activity, the negative and immoral meanings of this activity, the lack of partner’s sexual competence, and the potential evidence of one’s sexual inadequacy, along with the occurrence of interfering thoughts[ii]”. This is sex that’s not going well. Anything from doormat sex to abusive sex to my body-is-here-but-my-brain-is-not kind of sex. Or if you’re lost in self-consciousness. It’s not engaged sex.
Pleasure-centered orientation: This pattern reflects sex on a more basic level that's focused on pleasure and not on the emotional experience. It's about “the orgasmic cycle of excitement-pleasure-relief-satisfaction, which is accompanied by a sense of power and strength and two complementary states of mind — cognitive/emotional dissociation from the environment and focused attention on reaching the orgasm [iii].”. This is sex that’s purely about crossing the finish line; focusing on the physical sensations, with no real person-to-person connection.
Safe Conversations About Sex Need help with this? We created a Discussion Guide specifically for this episode. The guide is about creating a safe place to talk about sex in your marriage. We show you how to do that and we give you the questions you need to talk through in order to start having the conversations you’ve been avoiding or afraid to have!Get the Guide! Gender Differences in Sexual Experience Remember,
Has infidelity impacted your marriage? Do you feel like you need guidance through recovery and rebuilding your marriage?
A few months ago we ran a 15 Day Marriage Challenge and were absolutely stunned by the number of people going through that process who were dealing with betrayal in the form of an affair or infidelity.
Caleb created the 30 Day Betrayal Devotional set as a response to this need. This is a very unique product in the marketplace and in this podcast episode Caleb answers some questions and tells us about it.
By the way, these were written for the more common situation of husband betraying wife. If you are a couple where the roles are reversed, and the wife has betrayed the husband, just switch books and pronouns. Broken Couples Need to Heal From Affairs Together The first thing we recognized is that both the betrayer and the betrayed need to be working through their own issues in this process, but they need to be doing so in a way that opens them up to each other. These devotionals comes in a set of "His" and "Hers" and are complementary to each other. They're two separate journals but come in a set.
What happens is that you are working on things that complement and correlate with what your spouse is working on. For example, a few days in Caleb speaks to the betrayer about being willing to acknowledge his spouse's feelings and is talking to be the betrayed wife about sharing her feelings rather than always pursuing facts about the betrayal. The two parts match up day by day as you go through this journey.
And some good news: rarely is there a couple recovering from an affair where there was not some sort of intimacy deficiency in the marriage. Those couples who make a sincere effort to rebuild and recover often speak of their marriage being WAAAY better than before. What changed? All of a sudden everything becomes open and vulnerable. It's incredibly painful and risky but you have two people who are seeing way further into each other than they did before. As they heal and rebuild, they don't let go of this newfound intimacy! Recovering From Infidelity Needs a Proven Plan The second thing that we realized is that couples need a plan. To be honest, we initially didn't want to do a devotional because we didn't want to string together some warm fuzzies and lead people down an unrealistic pathway that was sprinkled with Christian platitudes.
So, Caleb wrote these devotionals with some very challenging Scripture readings but he also integrated them with a clinically proven pathway towards rebuilding and recovering from an affair.
This is a proven process that you're stepping through.
The first ten days help you confront the facts of the affair but move towards owning the feelings and the trauma of the affair: how it impacts the betrayed spouse, but also showing the betrayer how to demonstrate accountability and honesty.
The next 10 days deal with the 'why' of the affair. This is the part where you really start to make meaning of the affair. It's a very touching part of the devotional where you go deep with root causes in order to find the healing. By the end of this, you still won't like that the affair happened or the pain it caused, but you should be able to see that there is hope, there is purpose and that God is going to turn your grief and pain into blessing and recovery.
The last 10 days takes you through the decisions to forgive and reconcile. Do you want to do it? If yes, then it becomes about walking you through that as well. That is a very tough process to navigate through without guidance. Recovering From An Affair Should Result in Transformation We would never recommend having an affair in order to catalyze growth and transformation. However, since this has happened and it is a part of what you have experienced, the next thing I'm looking for is how can we take this heart-breaking, profoundly betraying, devastating discovery and turn it into something that is transformational.
Obviously,
Do you ever wonder why you can’t trust your spouse? Especially when you think you should be able to?
Before we start, we want to make it clear who this episode is for because it may not be immediately apparent from the title.
We’re speaking to men and women who are struggling to trust their spouse and recognize that this trust issue lies primarily within themselves at this point. There may have been a past betrayal or not. If there was you might say something like, “I know in my head that I can trust him or her now, but I just can’t get past the doubts.”
You know your spouse is trustworthy, but you can’t get there yourself as far as trusting them.
So, if you’re struggling to trust and you cannot, and you are sure this is about something happening within yourself, this article is for you.
On the other hand, if you’ve gone through a betrayal and you’re struggling to trust and maybe your spouse is continuing to act in ways that are concealing or suspicious in nature and your lack of trust is legitimate, this is not for you. Trust your gut.
But if it’s more like you feel something’s wrong in you rather than in your relationship, we’d like to help you.
Finally, if you’ve betrayed your spouse and you can’t get them to trust you, don’t just stick your spouse in the bucket we are discussing today. A severe betrayal takes a long time to recover from. In fact, their discovery of your betrayal was probably a traumatic event and your spouse may be suffering from a variation of PTDS called Post Infidelity Stress Disorder.
Remember, everything said here should be seen as a self-help tool and not as a replacement for counselling!
So…trust.
Trust has been defined as the “confidence that [one] will find what is desired [from another] rather than what is feared.[i] It’s the idea that when I turn to Caleb for something I have this innate confidence that he will provide what I desire. He’s safe. He’s reliable. He’s predictable. Now, if he’s all those things but I cannot trust him, then I have a problem that I need to address.
Trust is implicit in love. 1 Corinthians 13 talks about love, and verse 7 says, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Do you hear the trust implicit in that?
Proverbs 31:11 has this really neat little statement talking about the virtuous woman: “The heart of her husband trusts in her”. Trust is an emotional confidence in another person.
That’s why betrayal hurts so bad and why it takes time to hear – because it touches you to the core.
On the other hand, when you can’t trust but you should be able to, then this affects your marriage bond because of that fact that trust is implicit in love.
In terms of why you can’t trust your spouse, here are a few different possibilities that may apply to you. Lack of Trust as Means of Maintaining Control The first possibility is that you may be holding onto a lack of trust as a means of maintaining control.
In 2015, some researchers looked at the influence of trust on conflict discussions.
Typically, if you’re a trusting person you tend to make positive attributions about your spouse even in questionable circumstances. You also tend to display more positive emotions than negative when you’re in conflict. On the other hand, if you’re a low-trust individual, you tend towards pessimistic views.[ii]
For example, if you find a long black hair on your husband’s sweater and no one in your family has long black hair, a trusting spouse would remove the hair and that’s it. Instead, a low trust spouse may start the conversation with, “Who does this belong to?”
When you’re less trusting, you often move very quickly towards tactics that really destabilize the relationship or even harm it because you have this underlying belief that your spouse is concealing negative events from you.
In marriage then, low-trust spouses are more influential than high-trust spouses. They tend to pull down the high-trust spouse towards more negative o...
Even if you're happily married you might find dates with your spouse kind of awkward sometimes. What do you talk about? I know we struggle at times to have an easy flow of conversation, too.
I don’t know what it is about dates that make it difficult to know what to talk about. Sometimes we’re just distracted or exhausted but sometimes if you’re up to date with each other then you’re also not sure what to go over. Certainly, if there’s an ‘elephant’ in the room, that gets in the way too.
This is a good place to start because where couples struggle sometimes is they haven’t dealt with something that’s pretty major. One spouse initiates the date as a way to try to repair or even extend a peace offering.
We could go down quite a rabbit trail with this but I think it would be good just to point out that you want to set up your dates so that you have the same goal/agenda when you go on them.
If your marriage is distressed, be sure that you’re both heading in with an open mind that you’re doing this as one little step to move towards repair and reconciliation. If this is your situation, don’t go in with super high expectations and give your spouse the benefit of the doubt and show some generosity by extending good will.
This is one time that we’d actually recommend avoiding the elephant in the room. If the ‘elephant’, or issue, is too big for you, put that out there before you go and also suggest how you’d like to resolve that: set up a time to talk, ask for help from a spiritual leader in your church, or get some counselling. On the date itself, though, is not the time or place to hash out difficult issues.
What you want to try to do is to set up your dates to allow a little sweetness to percolate into your marriage. Warmth. Kindness: both given and received.
When you’re going on a date in the context of the distressed marriage you want to point the conversation toward topics that help you to build little wee connections with each other again. On the other hand, if your marriage is reasonably healthy but you just need a way to freshen up your dates and your relationship we’re going to point you toward the same topics!
We know that life happens. We all get super busy and because we’re always in the whirlwind we tend to lose track of those little details that are happening in each other’s lives. Remember how when you were dating you used to love finding out those tiny little facts about each other? Well, date conversations should steer in that direction. Talk About Relationships and Experiences Generally, and looking at research on conversations that people tend towards, about 55% of conversation times for males and about 2/3 for females is devoted to talking about relationships and experiences.[i] See, most people like to talk about relationships and experiences because these are the most influential forces in our lives in terms of our emotional wellbeing.
A much smaller amount of time goes to work or school-related trips, then to sport, then arrangements for future social activities, then culture and art and politics and religion.
So let me give you a few different ideas about this.
You definitely want to spend more time asking your spouse about the relationships you see less of. For example, how’s it going with their boss, with their mother, with their closer friends that maybe you don’t hang out with as a couple too much. These things are really important to your spouse.
Watch for little hints of emotion there and try to catch those and expand on them to learn more about your spouse’s feelings. Be curious. Rather than assuming you know something, ask about it.
Watch how you add your interpretive layers to what they’re saying, though. You may find more value, instead of thinking about how you see something just to stay with more neutral non-judgmental questions to ask your spouse how they experienced their friend or the specific circumstance at work.
Part of this is not only having the topics to talk about but ac...
Maybe your spouse has complained to you that he or she just doesn’t feel appreciated. Well, let’s just take that at face value today and work on this whole appreciation thing. It can only help, right?
One of my favorite Bible verses is: “You must let no unwholesome word come out of your mouth, but only what is beneficial for the building up of the one in need, that it may give grace to those who hear.” If every word we spoke in our marriages was tested by this verse, we would see some vast improvements! What Does Appreciation Look Like? There is a measurement tool used in research called the Appreciation in Relationships Scale which looks at these items:[i]
Telling your partner that he/she is the best Telling your partner how much you appreciate him/her Not taking your partner for granted Acknowledging and treating your spouse like s/he is someone special Noticing when your spouse does nice things for you and saying thank you, even for the really small things Feeling struck with a sense of awe and wonder when you think about your spouse being in your life.
Basically, appreciation is any feeling or expression of gratitude for who a person is and what they do. When you perceive that your spouse sees you as valuable, you feel appreciated. This, of course, leads to a greater sense of security in the marriage and also the feeling that you can be confident of how your spouse sees you.
It’s difficult when you’re not sure what your spouse thinks of you. This may be why your spouse is saying that s/he doesn’t feel appreciated. For some reason, they may not actually be sure of what you think of them.
When you take these needs for appreciation that we all have and you bring them into your marriage what you’re doing is shifting your focus away from your own self-interest and really starting to include your spouse’s needs. This shift in thinking is fundamental to showing appreciation because you have to start to mentally position yourself around what you’re giving rather than what you’re getting from the marriage.
When this shift takes place, you’re now expressing behaviours that help to maintain and build up your relationship. This is the whole point of appreciation!
8 Ways to Appreciate Your Spouse To help you get really good at this, we’ve created 8 Ways to Appreciate Your Spouse – some practicable, doable tactics to show appreciation. Incorporate these things into your marriage so that you can be an appreciative spouse.Get It! How Appreciation Blesses Your Marriage Here are five ways that appreciation benefits your marriage. We’ll show you why this works and what it does for your marriage so that you can really become intentional about putting this into place. First, Appreciate Your Spouse and Your Spouse Will Appreciate You A study from 2012 showed that “feeling appreciate by one’s spouse promotes one’s own appreciative feelings….people who feel more appreciated by their romantic partners report being more appreciative of their partners. In turn, people who are more appreciative of their partners report being more responsive to their partner’s needs.”[ii]
Appreciation begets more appreciation. When you appreciate your spouse, your spouse is more likely to appreciate you back. Appreciation starts a healthy cycle in your marriage – as one partner considers the other before self, the other partner starts to do the same, and the relationship as a whole benefits from this. Second, Appreciation Leads to Commitment and Protects from Divorce Further results of the 2012 study showed that people who are more appreciative of their partners are more committed and more likely to remain in their relationships over time.[iii] In this way, displays of appreciation are protective against divorce and separation.
Anything that contributes to the happy longevity of your marriage is really worthwhile! Third, Appreciation Positively Changes How You View Your Marriage Different research, from 2010,
Intimacy is one of the deepest needs of the human heart. We all crave it and we all enjoy it when we experience it in our marriages. Today, you need to pause and consider how you’re doing on the intimacy in your marriage.
We experience and express intimacy in different ways, so think of this as an intimacy checkup. You go to your family doctor for your annual physical, well, today is your annual relational!
Intimacy Self-Evaluation We put together a self-assessment which is a perfect tool to go along with this article. Download and work through the self-evaluation of how intimacy is working in your mind, your heart, your soul, and your body, and you’ll have a picture of where your strengths lie and also where your growth areas are.I Want It!
Intimacy is a full person experience: it’s your mind, heart, soul and body all in one. In the world of marriage research, we talk about cognition, emotion, physical intimacy, and spiritual intimacy. Rather than get all “woo woo” talking about intimacy, we want to keep it very real. Intimacy is nothing more than an exchange or a mutual interaction.[i] It’s a sharing between two people.
You can share your thoughts, your emotions, your spirituality, and your body. When you share all of those things in a deep way then you have deep intimacy. We’re going to go into each of these areas one by one so you can consider how you’re doing and if it is an area where you need to open up more.
But first a caveat: If you’re in an abusive marriage, more intimacy is not going to help. You need safety in order to share more intimately. If you give intimacy to someone who is not safe, you’re really giving them knowledge. And knowledge is power, and if that power is abused it is going to lead to even more hurt.
On the other hand, if you’re both healthy people – even if your marriage is unhappy and distressed and you both get your ugly on – becoming more intimate and showing your softer, deeper emotions and thoughts will give your spouse something easier to embrace. If this is reciprocated, you start to create healing and something new and much healthier in your marriage. Cognitive Intimacy: Sharing Your Thoughts Ever used the expression, “A penny for your thoughts!”?
Think about that request: we say that when we want to know someone more intimately. When we say “a penny for your thoughts” we’re asking to be invited into the world of their mind.
Here’s a good quote from a study in 1993: “The amount of personal information individuals disclose is positively related to how intimate they consider their relationship and positively related to marital satisfaction.”[ii]
Remember, we defined intimacy as an exchange. In cognitive intimacy, or in the context of our minds, this is just an exchange of information. When we disclose our thoughts to one another, this is cognitive intimacy.
Caleb gave me a man's perspective on this. He said often he has WAY more stuff going through his head than what he verbalizes. (I tend to think out loud, so this is a foreign concept to me…) He has to put sincere effort into disclosing his thoughts. He’s not holding back intentionally, he’s just in his head.
But here’s the deal: self-disclosure significantly predicted ratings of intimacy by husbands and wives on a day to day basis, meaning that you feel more intimate if you’re sharing what’s going on in your head. There are a few parts that go with this and you need all of the following parts in order to do this type of intimacy well:[iii]
Obvious, but you have to share your thoughts. This is called initial disclosure and is the starting point. Your spouse needs to do the same. The next critical point is called partner responsiveness which just means that the listener has to audibly and visibly react to the disclosure in a way that is relevant to the content that has been shared. Respond in a way that is relevant and that communicates that you understand, you care, and you confirm your spouse’s perspective.
What happens if your marriage really hasn’t been that great but you’ve been sticking it out for the kids, or for some other reason. Let’s say the reason you’ve been sticking it out is no longer relevant… Now what?
If the purpose for staying married is no longer relevant, is your marriage toast? Or can you do something to redeem and reconfigure your relationship so that new life is breathed into it? Barriers and Rewards in Marriage Why do people stay married? In 2003, two researchers set out to answer this. They cited past research that showed that people typically stay married due to either rewards (positive outcomes associated with being in a relationship) or barriers (psychological forces that restrain people from leaving relationships).[i]
Happy marriages often stay together because of rewarding aspects of marriage, while unhappy marriages often stay together because of barriers to ending the marriage.
The researchers were interested in specific rewards and barriers that kept marriages together and used data from a 17-year longitudinal study of marital instability to find some answers.
In this study, couples were asked to list (1) specific barriers that prevented them from moving forward with divorce, (2) specific rewards that kept them together, and (3) whether they stayed due to a lack of alternative relationships.
The results showed:
When couples were asked why they stayed in their marriage, 74% listed various rewards, 25% listed barriers, and 1% listed lack of alternatives. Of those who listed barriers, the number one barrier to ending the marriage was staying for the sake of the children. The second largest barrier listed was religion. “People who attributed the cohesiveness of their marriages primarily to barriers (such as staying for the children) tended to be relatively unhappy with their marriages and were likely to be thinking (or acting) in ways that might lead to divorce.” “Thinking about marital cohesion exclusively in terms of barriers predicted divorce up to 14 years later, even after controlling for marital happiness and divorce proneness.[ii]
The researchers also noted that barriers were not as powerful as rewards in maintaining cohesion. Without a strong attraction between spouses (as reflected in love, friendship, or positive communication) many people eventually find ways to overcome existing barriers and leave their marriages.
For example, couples that are concerned about the effect of divorce on children may wait until their children are older or have left home before divorcing.
Here’s the point: what’s keeping you together now could lead you to your ungluing later.
You can think of this from a Scriptural perspective, too. Marriage, in terms of purpose, is cast in Ephesians 5 as a way to express the relationship of Christ towards his people on earth: there’s communication, intimacy, covenant faithfulness, loyalty and commitment, and deep, unfailing love.
If your marriage has been carried along on the winds of any other kind of purpose, it’s time to seriously consider how you can remanufacture and build something that is aligned with the divinely ordained purpose. Surely, this is a far richer, far more joyful, perspective!
But, just because you’re staying together for the wrong reasons doesn’t mean divorce is inevitable! If there’s pain in your marriage, why not find a place for the truth of redemption to be expressed in your marriage? Surely this is a better route than the devastation of divorce. Don’t Wait to Get Help Based on the research (above), marriages that stay together for the children are often unhappy marriages that could be headed for divorce once the children grow up. What should these marriages do? How can they find help?
A large part of the problem is that many unhappy marriages don’t seek help at all.
Other research shows that “most distressed couples do not seek marital therapy” and those who do wait an average of 6 years after serious relationship problems d...
Here's today's question:
"Background: I grew up in an abusive home (my father is an addict and a bully, but my mother never reported his abuse to authorities or tried to explain that what he was doing was wrong- we just pretended that nothing had happened afterwards) and my husband grew up in a home with not much affection or healthy communication.
I am a newly trained mediator and I know we have issues (small issues but after 11 years they have grown to cause serious problems) but when I try and utilize my training, his radar goes up and he shuts down, Even though my communication is pretty terrible when I'm not using mediation (or at least, we have these awful cycles---he says he can't talk to me when I'm upset (voice raised or if I'm panicky or angry) he brings up things unrelated to what we are discussing (which granted, yes, need attention, but if I'm trying to resolve something that's bothering me and I want peace and harmony and to be a TEAM instead of petty ineffective blamers, imo, he sabotages the conversation and I go back to reptilian brain, angry or hurt mode and everything shuts down.
So my question is, I'm trying so damned hard....I know he would like this stuff resolved too....but how on earth can things get fixed when he seems to prefer our dance of dysfunction????
And also, side note, I had a dream last night about being sad and single and so lonely and thinking of ways to meet someone to love and cherish me and be on the same side together....only to realize in my dream that I'm married (in my dream I had forgotten apparently) dark, foreboding stuff. :(
Signed, Sad and ready to give up in Alberta"
Listen to the podcast for Caleb's answer!
A listener wrote in with the question:
"How do you set boundaries with social media? What's acceptable to keep the marriage from the pressures of the world. For example: One spouse doesn't like revealing pictures put out and the other is getting physically fit and feeling the need to parade?"
Listen to the podcast for Caleb's answer!
This week, we have a question from one of our audience members who wanted clarity on her expectations around side effects of her husband's testosterone therapy.
"What experience do you have with testosterone therapy for men? I believe part of the cause of my husband's infidelity is due to much testosterone pellets and an excessive need for sex. I do not excuse him for one minute for the devastation he caused. think If that is going to be an available treatment for a medical condition some kind of information and counseling should be required as to how you will feel.
We are 2-1/2 years past D day finding out of multiple hookups just for sex. We'd been married for 36 years!!! He is 59 and I am 57 right now. I credit my faith in keeping this altogether without telling anyone or counselling. Not a great idea after the fact. He's moved on from the infidelities and I still struggle at times.
Q2: I guess I'm trying to understand if testosterone can make you impulsive and have the need to have sex in abundance. I feel you should be in control if your self, but if you are on the high end of the testosterone scale 1200-1500 can it change you? I do know hormones are powerful and make you feel all sorts of things."
Listen to the podcast episode for Caleb's answer!
This week, Caleb answers a very touching question from Betty*, one of our email subscribers. She asked,
"I responded a few months ago, rather aggressively, may I add, to your husband's question. And of course, he graciously responded with a question that pierced through my pain and frustration and found my heart. He asked," Do you still want to be married?" I thought about it for weeks!! Please let him know that we found a local counselor, who is also our pastor, and have been progressing, to say the least. What you two do is so vital in a world that opposes marriage and commitment in general.Thank you! Thank you!
Anyways, to respond to your request, my question would be ... " After infidelity strikes, how do you trust your husband again?" I know it takes time to learn how to trust again, but how do you truly grant yourself the space to be vulnerable in that way? Or ... are you bruised for life? Sometimes I feel like I am a shell of who I once was; a child learning to be confident in herself and womanhood, it's embarrassing.
So glad, this is anonymous! lol . Even if this isn't broadcasted I'd love your take on this."
Listen to the podcast episode for Caleb's answer!
*name changed for confidentiality reasons
Peggy wrote in to ask about sexual addiction and its effects on marriage. She writes, "Verlynda, First, I think your plans for traveling for a year sounds awesome! What an exciting adventure to undertake. Your family will be in my prayers that you will only experience slight bumps in the road and have a wonderful family bonding time! I love the podcasts and feel so lucky to have found you. I think the first one I listened to was something on infidelity. I'm wondering if you might consider doing a podcast on sexual addiction. While the effects on a marriage are similar to infidelity there's a deeper undercurrent with it. I knew there was something off in our relationship and questioned if my husband was having an affair, he always answered "no," so I just thought he was a workaholic along with the impact of binge drinking. Finally, in the depths of his addiction he began receiving texts messages and phone calls that tipped me off. Sexual addiction has a broad range of activities from porn and beyond. My husband's issue started with pornographic magazines back in the 70's and escalated to going to bars for lap dances. It basically followed the invasive changes that sexual addictions has taken in our society and how accepted it has become. The attitude of" boys will be boys" doesn't help but speaks to the maturity level of some men in the American culture. He was taken with being desired by other women and became infatuated with several but insists he never loved them only me. I still deal with the hurt and pain that he could break our marriage vows and the years of deceit and lying. I really don't feel I was acting co-dependently in this because I was asking if something was wrong and we consulted several marriage counselors over the years. He admits he wasn't honest with them also. I have listened to many podcasts and YouTube's on this topic. I feel that Marsha Means and Barbara Steffens approach to looking at the PTSD or PISD (post infidelity stress disorder) it causes for the spouse has truly helped me. Plus I accept that this addiction is rooted in an intimacy disorder. Many "experts" support divorce but I chose not to take that path because of my religious beliefs. So I was wondering if you might look at the issues of sexual addictions from a perspective of staying in the marriage. Thanks so much, Peggy
PS I have to admit I love both of your laughs! Keep up the great work! Listen to the podcast episode for Caleb's answer!
*name changed for confidentiality reasons
Today we have a question from one of our audience members who is asking for help to overcome some significant mental barriers around her husband’s sexual history.
Hi, I have a question. I got married just recently and much later in life...around 40 years old. I was a virgin when I got married. My husband was not. However he shared with me that he had not had any sexual partners for at least three years prior to our being married, because of his renewed commitment to Christ.
I've been a Christian since I was a youth and my husband had also been a Christian since he was a child however he was not sexually abstinent in his relationships.
We did not have sex prior to getting married. Since we have been married we have had a great sex life, but I have struggled with the fact that he's had previous sexual partners.
My question is how can I best deal with my husband's previous sexual history and not let it interfere with our sexual relationship now. Of course, this is a vulnerable issue for me since I came into the marriage without sexual experience... So I get feelings of insecurity...wondering if he is comparing us to other relationships...etc. These thoughts can be intrusive for me.
Now, today I had a bomb dropped on me when I got the results of a recent Pap smear saying I tested positive for HPV. It's very upsetting to find out that after being abstinent all these years and waiting for my husband to have sex; that he gave me a STD that could cause cervical cancer. The strain I have is the dangerous strain and will require more testing.
I've already been struggling with feelings over his sexual past and now it's intensified a thousand fold as a result of contracting this STD from him. I feel like this is definitely going to affect my feelings toward him and toward sexual intimacy with him.
He was tested for std's before our marriage but there is not a test for men for HPV, so in his defense he could not have known he had been exposed unless his previous girlfriend knew and told him.
I'm hoping and praying that my immune system will fight off this virus and I will be okay, but unfortunately I've had previous health problems that have weakened my immune system so I'm really upset and stressed that I may end up not fighting it off.
I'm just disappointed, sad, upset and hurt that I have to deal with an STD after waiting all this time to have sex with one man in my life.... My husband.
I'm sure this is going to cause me anger and resentment for his choices and not being abstinent as a Christian man who proclaims Christ.
I really have to say, at the risk of sounding judgmental.... That I am so tired of Bible believing Christians completely ignoring the word of God when it comes to sexual integrity! Why is it that people just wink at this sin like it's no big deal ??? People that I see at church every week that are living with their boyfriends and girlfriends that are having sex and acting as though it's not a sin. I don't understand it's very frustrating!
Christians act as though it's inconsequential and casual...
Please pray for me that I can be full of grace and forgiveness toward my husband and that we would grow stronger and more in love and that I won't withdraw from him like I feel like doing at this moment.
The last piece of this puzzle is the question of fidelity?? Has he had sex with someone else during the time we've been together and contracted this STD and now passed it to me?? I really, honestly in my heart and soul, mind and spirit are telling me that he is being truthful about his sexual history and hadn't had sex for 3 years before we met...and that was his previous girlfriend for a couple years. But, my question is...why wouldn't she had let him know she had HPV. Most women know they have it because of their annual Pap smear. She would have known either back then or since then. They broke up in 2013. And they remained good friends. So wouldn't a good friend tell you this??
Jason* wrote in to say:
"First all, huge thanks for what you are doing. My marriage is still in trouble, and it's even getting worse and worse. But thanks to your podcasts, I'm more ready to forgive and to accept my wife after her infidelity disclosure.
The question is as follows. How do I fight for my marriage and my family (there are children) and my wife while she's undecided to stay or to leave as she feels in love with her affair mate?
She's saying she can't imagine to be my wife anymore while she can't imagine losing me as a father of our children and part of the family. In other words, she wants to do life together, but not as husband and wife..."
Listen to the podcast episode to see what Caleb had to say to Jason.
*name changed for confidentiality reasons
Joshua* writes:
My wife and I started dating, got married the next year, had our first child a year later, and then our second child the following year. Around the same time as our second child was born, an ex-girlfriend texted me.
Conversations started as just "Hey, how's life?" but quickly escalated to sexting as we used to do when we dated. Right before I could tell my wife, she saw the texts and got very upset. I had already ended communications with this girl and just couldn't strike up the nerve to tell my wife what I had done.
Fast forward a couple months and we had been through about a month of counselling session. Things were getting better between us and then I had to go on a business trip. I had a few friends I had planned on meeting with while there, but there was one in particular my wife was not comfortable with me talking to. So I told her I wouldn't meet with that friend, but I lied. She later found out and again had to start mending our relationship.
Things have been going pretty well, except now I have a week long business trip coming up and she keeps bringing up the past issues. I know what I've done and how I've messed up, but she keeps bringing it up. I ask her not to because it still hurts so bad, but she does anyways. What can I do in this next month or so in order to help build her trust again and help her to stop bringing up my past mistakes?
Listen to the podcast episode for Caleb's answer!
*Name has been changed for confidentiality reasons
The common perception is that you can be super busy OR happily married. What we wanted to know is if you could be super busy AND happily married. Do you need to change your lifestyles, or are you good to go? No pressure!
A lot of research and marriage advice points to the importance of spending time together as a couple, but perhaps this is not the most important factor when it comes to a healthy marriage. How Do You Treat Each Other When You Are Not Busy? It turns out that how you treat each other when you do have time together is what actually matters.
In 2004, researchers looked at a particular type of marriage that tends to be particularly hectic – the medical marriage. These researchers wanted to analyze correlations between busyness, marital adjustments, and overall satisfaction with work/life balance in marriages in which husbands worked as physicians. (Stay tuned, we’ve got a wife-as-physician study next!)
What they discovered is “more than hours worked, it is how a couple treats each other when they are not working that most powerfully determines the quality of contemporary medical marriage.”[i]
How were these successful marriages treating each other? The researchers found these qualities in the marriages that self-identified as satisfying:
Husbands didn’t let work stress negatively affect their at-home behaviour (good job, guys!) Husbands often indicated their concern about how their work/life balance and busyness required them to spend time away from family (that’s sweet) Wives found ways to keep themselves busy when their husbands were working long hours. Wives who were satisfied with their marriages learned to “accept this role without rancor, to build their individual support systems, and to carry on with family activities during their husbands’ work-related absences.”[ii] (that’s wise) Wives held specific perspectives about their husband’s work – that it was done for noble reasons (common mission!)
In summary, “these busy couples did not have marriages that were less satisfying than those of other people in general. Quite the contrary, despite the hectic nature of medical life, physician’s wives claim to be quite satisfied with their marriages.”[iii]
Even if you’re not a doctor, if you’re plain busy and you have these elements in your marriage, you should be good to go!
Let’s switch genders and see what happens. In 2013, researchers looked at medical marriages in which the wife was the physician. They interviewed spouses of internal medical resident and faculty physicians, as they wanted to know how these couples made their marriages work in the face of the inflexible schedules of doctors.
These three themes emerged from these interviews in terms of what these husbands of doctors felt was important to the health of their busy marriage:
Having a set time for synchronizing schedules: Couples in these hectic marriages would often set a specific time where they would sit down and do their best to synchronize their schedules. Often schedules revolved around the physician’s schedule out of necessity. Frequent verbal support: This was important in both directions. Husband’s verbally supported their wives’ busy careers. Wives verbally supported the husband’s sacrifices, work, and willingness to take care of things at home when they were not able to. Shared decision-making: “Joint decision-making within physician families serves to increase the personal agency of female physicians’ husbands and may reduce work-life stress for physician wives.”[iv]
So it looks like you CAN have a hectic life and be happily married! The Importance of Mutuality and Intimate Partnership Much of the advice from these two studies applies to marriages in which one spouse is extremely busy and the other spouse is not, but what about marriages in which both individuals are living hectic lives?
A study completed in 2003 pointed towards the importance of mutuality in dual-earner couples living lives.
Jealousy. This can drive some people absolutely nuts - and their spouse feels completely justified.
It’s a real conundrum. And it’s particularly worse when the jealous spouse has had prior reason to become jealous — a betrayal has occurred.
What does a person do?
Healthy And Unhealthy Forms of Jealousy. Research shows that jealousy can have positive or negative effects on a relationship, depending on the type of jealousy that is being displayed.
There are three kinds of jealousy:
Reactive jealousy: the degree to which individuals experience negative emotions in reaction to a betrayal/unfaithfulness. Possessive jealousy: the effort jealous individuals can go to to prevent contact of their spouse with individuals of the opposite sex. Anxious jealousy: a process in which the individual ruminates about and cognitively generates images of a mate’s infidelity, and experiences feelings of anxiety, suspicion, worry and distrust.[i]
It is important to note that, in contrast to reactive jealousy, neither possessive nor anxious jealousy actually need a rival or a betrayal to be triggered.
Results from the same research showed that individuals high in anxious jealousy had lower relationship quality, as did individuals married to spouses who were high in anxious jealousy.[ii] Remember, anxious jealousy is just about rumination thoughts – there isn’t necessarily any reality to it.
The conclusion here was that anxious jealousy is bad for your marriage. Other clinical studies show that this type of thinking is characteristic of pathologically jealous individuals who, in general, experience great relationship distress.
If you’re the anxiously jealous individual, I’m guessing that you’re not enjoying being that spouse any more than your spouse is enjoying your jealousy. Ruminating is not fun. It takes a lot of energy and creates a lot of negativity. I want to encourage you to get some help. Life doesn’t have to be this way.
You’ve probably had some very real, even traumatic experiences or really, really significant disappointments in very important relationships, but there is healing. It doesn’t have to go on like this. The best thing you can do is take this to a good therapist and work with them towards finding a less anxious way to evaluate the world around you.
The study also found positive associations between relationship quality and reactive jealousy.[iii]
When a spouse reacts jealously to a betrayal, it is likely to be interpreted by their offending spouse as a token of love and caring and can even enhance the relationship. While reactive jealousy is good – you should be jealous if your relationship is threatened, we don’t recommend inducing reactive jealousy as a way to enhance your relationship. There are many other, safer ways to work on your marriage!
Another finding from the study was that possessive jealousy was not found to be consistently related to relationship quality.[iv] Remember, that possessive jealousy is considerable effort a person goes to in order to prevent contact with the opposite sex. What the researchers felt is that this depends on how this jealousy was expressed.
If you are buying flowers or romancing your spouse to keep them interested, it may help your marriage. In contrast, when you use threats or violence or debasement to prevent unfaithfulness, that will reduce the quality of your marriage.
In either case, you need to ask yourself if this possessive jealousy is coming out of a place of fullness or a place of neediness. Fullness is – I appreciate what we have so much, I’m going to guard it. Neediness is – I can never be sure of what we have so I’m going to keep slapping romance Band-Aids on my anxiety to try to reduce the pressure. That is not healthy. Relabeling Jealousy in Your Relationship If your spouse is jealous and you have found this frustrating in the past, you might consider reframing it. For example, if you understand that reactive jealousy does not negatively affect the qu...
If your marriage is sexless, there is a way back to rekindling intimacy. It’s not easy, but it might not be as impossible as you think, either! We’ll help you understand some potential causes and then give you some direction to start point your marriage relationship back towards the wonder and joy of sex.
The Problem of Roommate Marriages Sexless marriages are more common than I thought. In fact, research has found that 16% of marriages identify as sexually inactive.[i] However, what is surprising is that the research is not as common as you might expect. This topic was more difficult to find research on!
The first study we found looked particularly at marriages in which one spouse greatly desired sex to be a part of the relationship, but was forced to remain involuntarily celibate (desiring sexual contact but not receiving it for 6 months) due to the wishes of their spouse. This is a common situation in sexually inactive marriages.[ii]
The 6-month mark was someone arbitrary, but the researchers suggest that the length of time one has been celibate is not as important as whether one self-defines as involuntarily celibate.[iii]
The bottom line is your marriage is sexless if your spouse thinks it is, or you do.
Another study looked at whether sexually inactive marriages were less happy and stable than those with sexual activity. Donnelly found that sexually inactive marriages were correlated with the following:
Unhappiness in the marital relationship Increased likelihood of separation Lack of shared activities Few arguments over sex.
She concluded that “although sexually inactive marriages are not uncommon, they are not happy, stable marriages in which the partners simply do not have sex. Lack of sexual activity may be a danger signal for many marriages.”[iv]
Perhaps it would be more useful to think of sexual inactivity as a symptom of a problem rather than thinking it is the problem itself.
Think about it; if it doesn’t change, and your marriage remains sexless, you’re at risk of seeking to fill that cavity elsewhere. That’s not good.
Consider thinking of it as a symptom because if you take care of the relationship you’ll probably see this take care of itself. In fact, when Caleb does marriage counselling, he spends more time repairing and reawakening the bond that exists between the couple. When that secure, emotional connection is thriving again, most couples sort out the sex issues by themselves.
To those of you who are withholding sex… I want to challenge you. I get why you might be doing that, but there are consequences that I want you to be aware of. Here are some of the consequences of sexless marriages, all taken from the same study[v]:
“some of the most common responses to involuntary celibacy are sexual frustration (79%), feelings of depression (34%) or rejection (23%)” 26% report problems with concentration 35% described deficits in self-esteem that occurred as a result of being rejected.
If you’re unhappy in your marriage, I can see why you’d withhold sex to kind of force the issue or try to regain some power, but in all likelihood, it’s actually really working against you – if repairing the marriage is what you want to do.
If your husband or wife is acting like a monster, why would you want to have sex with him or her? I get that! At the same time though, withholding sex is not a successful strategy for moving towards repair. The Bible even talks about the danger of withholding sex in 1 Corinthians 7 – we’re not to do that.
Yet, I would guess the reason why you’re withholding or your spouse is, is because you want intimacy – not just sex. If your spouse is not abusive, a better strategy would be to address the lack of intimacy rather than just highlight it by withholding sexual intimacy as well.
So let’s get practical here. How are couples who find themselves in this situation supposed to move forward? There is not a lot of research on this,
We know for some of you, this episode is going to be a tough one. We’re going to speak the truth in love because we’re committed to integrity, but at the same time we want to give you hope because this IS hope, and recovery of your marriage IS possible.
If you’re at the point where you think your marriage is fine, I hope you will take from this post the need to be proactive. Don’t want until you’re wondering if you can recover your marriage to take action – take action now!
A Marriage Checkup If you want an objective evaluation of your marriage, download this assessment tool. Even if you feel your marriage is doing great, this might highlight some blind spots you weren’t aware of, so that you can work on them. Remember it’s only a measurement tool: what you do with the information is what really matters!I Want It!
Personally, we don’t believe that any marriage is ever beyond recovery. We do believe that in some cases, like an abusive marriage, it is not safe to recover the marriage until the abuse issue is addressed thoroughly.
We do not have any judgment for folks that have decided to move on – we’re not God and it’s not our job to judge that – but if you’re out there today and you just want someone to tell you there’s hope, then listen, there is hope! We’re going to talk about a number of things that challenge that hope, but we will end up with some things that you hope, so stick with us. Indicators That a Marriage is Moving Beyond Recovery Research indicates that the following behaviours may be warning signs that a marriage is headed past recovery and towards divorce. A Lot of Spouse Hostility Hostility without warmth is a major warning sign that your marriage longevity is seriously threatened.
A study was conducted of over 400 couples married an average of 18 years. The study went on for five years and looked into the hostility of these marriages, the divorces that happened, and the quality of the interaction between spouses.[i]
Hostility became a theme in the marriages that ended, so let’s look at hostility for a moment. The researchers looked for the frequency of how often a spouse had:
gotten angry been critical shouted or yelled, ignored their spouse threatened to do something that would upset their spouse tried to make him or her feel guilty, or said that their spouse had made him or her unhappy.
On the other hand, warmth looked like times when their spouse had:
asked for his/her opinion listened to his/her point of view let them know that he or she cares acted in a loving and affectionate manner let them know that s/he is appreciated helped them something important to him/her had a good laugh with them, or acted supportive or understanding.
Here’s what they found: “In every instance, greater marital instability was associated with more hostility and less warmth in marital interactions.”[ii]
This warmth vs. hostility dynamic was so apparent that the researchers were able to predict with an 80% level of accuracy which couples would divorce the following year. All they had to look for was high levels of hostility and lesser levels of warmth.
The researchers summarized their findings with the following statement, “Couples observed to exhibit high levels of hostile, angry, critical, stubborn, inconsiderate, defiant, or rejecting behavior that is not counterbalanced by considerate, cooperative, or affectionate behavior were more likely to perceive high levels of hostility in their marital interactions, were more likely to have unstable marriages, and were more likely to actually separate or divorce.”[iii]
All that to say, that hostility needs to be counterbalanced with warmth in a marriage, or it will have lasting negative effects. We all get our ugly on once in a while unfortunately, but if those times are balanced with a lot of warmth and affection, it will serve your marriage much better. Significant Ambivalence and Lack of Responsiveness
If you’re some creepy dude reading this to try to extract more pleasure from your wife – go away. This is not about exploitation.
But, if you’re a husband or wife who wants more physical intimacy, and you’re committed to the growth and overall health of your marriage, then you’re in the right spot. This is more about what what you’re not giving than what you’re not getting!
First, we’ll start with three short term strategies about what you can do differently today, then we’ll move into three longer-term strategies that are more strategic and more about marriage building.
We might stereotype a bit here as typically men have a higher desire than women. If your relationship is the opposite, that’s fine – just switch genders throughout this blog post! Three Ways to Initiate Sex Today (Short Term Strategies) A recent study looked at what factors had an impact on the sexual desire of women in long term relationships. Out of all the factors that they listed, two are particularly relevant “partner characteristics” that relate to things an individual can do to increase sexual desire in his spouse.[i] Display Attentiveness To Your Spouse When the women from this study observed their spouses putting effort into the relationship, it made them more likely to want to engage in sexual activity.[ii]
This is a great starting point! If your heart isn’t in the marriage, Mr. Husband, why do you expect your wife to have her heart in the sex? We shouldn’t have to say things this obvious but sometimes we need to really wake up and be confronted with the truth. Caleb has literally had wives tell him in the counselling office that they just feel “like he needs me in the kitchen and in the bedroom.” That is not a good feeling!
What these researchers noted is that this care for the marriage relationship was demonstrated through romantic or thoughtful gestures that happened OUTSIDE of a sexual setting.
When you extend romantic gestures outside of a sexual context and do so without any expectation of sexual activity, that tells your spouse you appreciate them as a person – not just as a sexual possibility. If you only warm up the romance when you’re trying to get her sexual engine going, you’re basically just objectifying your wife.
This study had some great quotes from the women they spoke to. Men, listen closely. Women – can you relate?
“When it comes down to it, when you’re hopping into bed at night and there has been no romance through the day, for me, I’m like “Back off, you can’t just expect that right away.” (Jill, 28)[iii]
Another woman suggested that if her spouse took her out to dinner this would increase her desire afterwards, instead of just proposing sexual activity when they were in bed together. “It just shows that he’s planned something or that he put thought into what’s going on instead of rolling over in bed and saying, ‘hey, what’s going on?’ Like, it just feels like it’s more thought being put into it and I think that’s what I appreciate more.” (Carly, 21)[iv]
Murray and Milhausen, the researchers, conclude that sexual scripts are effective – setting the stage helps both spouses understand where things are headed. It makes things predictable.
The other point here that is critical is the idea of being invested in the relationship for the sake of the relationship; not just for the sake of sex. That’s why people use prostitution – they want sex without a relationship, but it doesn’t fulfill the deeper more important need of whole-person connection (i.e., relationship). That’s what makes marriage sex the best is that you’re building intimacy with the whole person! Engage in Intimate Communication With Your Spouse Going back to the same study we’ve been looking at, “most women indicated that having an intimate, emotionally revealing conversation” with their spouse brought them closer. One woman explained that being emotionally close with her spouse through conversations “made her want to get closer to him physically as well.
Life is super busy.
We get that.
Rather than focusing on the hopelessness of the ‘busy’ problem, why not take the time you do have and make the most of it?
Here are 10 sure-fire ways to make time for each other in a crazy busy marriage. These are not things that will ADD to your busyness, but allow you to connect WITHIN the context you’re already in.
It would be wrong for us not to challenge you at this point though, to look at your busyness objectively and ask yourself if there aren’t some things you can eliminate. You need to be really careful that you’re not using busyness to take you away from what you need to be attending to, which is your relationship with each other.
Not every busy couple is guilty of this, but it’s worthwhile asking yourself if you find meaning in busyness. If so, why? Is your busyness a coping mechanism for something else that’s going on?
Is your busyness functional or is your busyness dysfunctional? Don’t use your busyness as an excuse to not connect with your spouse. Some Surprising Statistics About Modern Day Couple Leisure Time How has couple leisure time changed over the decades? The answer may surprise you!
A study from 2010 analyzed time budget diaries from 1965, 1975 and 2003. In these diaries, married couples recorded how they spent each hour of their time each day, enabling the researchers to see how leisure time has varied over the years.
They expected to see that the percentage of leisure time with a spouse decreased but actually found the opposite.
In 1965, the percentage of leisure time spent in the presence of a spouse was 59%. This increased to 62% in 1975 and 66% in 2003. The researchers stated that “the increase in the percentage of time spent in the presence of a spouse over the past four decades was particularly evident for social activities, such as going out to a restaurant, café, bar, party or reception. In addition, joint leisure time spent on in-home social activities increased, such as visiting and receiving friends and playing games.”[i]
They concluded that the evidence contradicts the popular idea that people are increasingly busy nowadays and have less time for their families, and suggest that over the years, couples have managed to find more time to spend with one another.[ii]
We have a couple of issues with this conclusion. One thing is that they’re talking about the percentage of leisure time – not the quantity of time the couple spends together. So we have no way of knowing if they have more or less leisure time, just that they spend a higher portion of that time together.
Another issue is that they don’t actually describe whether that lovely couple spending leisure time at a sidewalk café are engaged at an emotional level or if they’re both on their phones or watching the traffic go by.
But, it is still good news that more of the available leisure time is going to spousal time! Making the Most of Your Limited Time Together We’re still really busy people. One point to consider in all your busyness is that you can dwell on how little time you have together instead of the quality of that time. Rather than obsessing over the quantity of time you’re not getting, how about focussing on making the most of the time you do have?
Studies suggest that when it comes to couple time together, the quantity of time together is not the most important factor. The most important factor is how satisfied couples report feeling with the leisure time they spend together.[iii]
Many studies have shown a correlation between couple leisure time and marital satisfaction, but a particular study in 2014 looked at this correlation more specifically. It looked at 1200 couples and how satisfied they were with their marriages and their leisure time together. It turns out what really matters is how satisfied you feel with leisure time. That matters more than the amount of leisure time when looking at marital satisfaction.[iv]
That is good news for busy couples!
If you really want to build more intimacy in your marriage – and who wouldn’t??? – here are four ways to do that. Take the time to hear, and digest this.
1st Way to Build Intimacy: Intimacy is Built Through Disclosure and Responsiveness Given that intimacy itself is purely emotional, let’s put a nice, sterile definition on it…
Intimacy is what happens through interactions of self-disclosure and partner responsiveness to disclosure. This process is believed to develop feelings of closeness between the speaker and the listener.[i]
Gotta love it!
Perhaps the definition that Caleb uses will be easier to understand. He says that intimacy is really like “Into Me See”. When I let you see into me and you respond appropriately, and when that is reciprocated, you get intimacy – That’s what deepens love.
So, the first way that you can increase the level of intimacy in your relationship is through disclosure and responsiveness, or doing the “into me see” thing.
Husbands, Caleb has some words of wisdom for you. When you let your wife see your emotions, that creates far more intimacy than when you let your wife just see facts and information about you.[ii]
It’s cute and fun and worthwhile for you to share that you got a bike for your sixth birthday. However, when you tell her how you felt after you fell off your new bike and your dad got all mad at you for scratching it, that will create greater intimacy than just telling her you got a bike.
Again, when you complain about the guys at work, that’s fine. You need to share. When you tell her you’re afraid of losing your job though, and that you’re carrying this fear around like a dark cloud in your heart, that will create intimacy far deeper than the facts regarding your work situation.
Wives, the same deal goes for you. You need to be connecting emotionally with your husband. Intimacy is built up when I let you see into my emotional world. That’s very vulnerable.
The flip side of this is that when your spouse shares an intimate detail with you: you have to respond. You must, must, MUST acknowledge it. Even if all you can think of is “Wow, I never knew that”, then just say, “Wow, I never knew that”; or “Thank you for sharing that with me – that’s really special.”
Something, please! It’s not just enough to share: responsiveness needs to happen too. 2nd Way To Build Intimacy: Intimacy is Built Through Knowledge and Understanding There is a great study from 1998 which is worth mentioning, even though a lot of couples have already figured this out.
First, couples who are better at predicting each other reported greater feelings of marital intimacy.[iii] That’s just saying that couples feel more intimate if they know each other well.
Become a student of your spouse! Intimacy comes from knowing and understanding each other.
There is a positive cycle that happens here. When you accurately understand and know a person, that will lead to greater trust. You trust the people you know best (assuming that the knowledge is positive…).
When you have that greater degree of trust, you feel safe to be more expressive of your inner world of emotions and thoughts. In other words, you become more vulnerable and you’re more willing to self-disclose. Then what? That leads to more knowledge and understanding between the two of you, and more predictability and then there is more trust.
And what happens when there is more trust? Intimacy!
It’s a brilliant positive cycle. This is why marriage should keep getting better and better.
So, you can build intimacy by increasing your knowledge and understanding of each other, but how do you really tease out that knowledge and understanding? 3rd Way to Build Intimacy: Intimacy is Built Through Curiosity Curiosity is the tool you need to go down that path of seeking further knowledge and understanding.
A study from 2014 investigated the link between curiosity and intimacy. The study had a definition full of research lingo, so let me summarize it for you.
Codependency is a term that gets thrown around a lot. What’s a little freaky about it is that we all have a touch of this in our lives.
We’re not here to put people in buckets, but to help you make sense of the world around you. If codependency is part of your world, here is some great advice on how to shift to a healthier place in your marriage.
What is Codependency? Codependency is actually surprisingly hard to define. Perhaps the easiest way to get a succinct, lightweight but accurate definition is to google the phrase “codependency jokes”. If you’re worried that you may be codependent, and you have a good sense of humour, you may actually find some help there.
But to those of you who realize this is part of your world, it’s no joke. It’s serious. It’s really hard sometimes, and it’s a bewildering world to try to navigate your way out of.
One more thing – going back to what I mentioned earlier, we’re not here to put people into buckets. Actually, it can sometimes be very unhelpful to put people into buckets. It tends to give people a label, and then we treat people according to their label. It fails to honour your individuality, your personhood, the fact that you too are created in the image of God and you are, like everyone else, a valuable fallible child of God.
So, please don’t think we’re just trying to stick you in a bucket and give you a label. What we’re hoping to accomplish is to help those of you are who in codependent relationships to begin to make sense of your world. We want to give you a starting point that you can work from. If you’re feeling lost, your way out starts with understanding where you are today.
Am I Codependent? To help you, we created a self-assessment that you can download and complete to score yourself. It’s adapted from a professional tool but you’ll be able to complete this and get a sense of where you’re at in terms of the likelihood of codependence being a significant part of the way that you interact with your spouse or family or origin. So, if you’re wondering, “Is this me?” make sure you get a copy of this free assessment!I Want It!
Ok, back to our definition. It’s rather difficult to define codependency, but here is a fairly recent definition from the research: Codependency “involves relationship patterns, with two people meeting each other’s needs in dysfunction ways.”[i] That’s good, but pretty generic.
Some other researchers define codependency as “a pattern of compulsive behaviors that is motivated by dependence on another’s approval and is designed to find a sense of safety, identity, and self-worth.”[ii] These are more tangible dynamics. They go on to identify some of the traits and patterns that can be found in codependent individuals.
Codependent individuals place their self-esteem in their ability to “control and influence the behavior and feelings of others.” This attempt to control can actually look like the codependent individual catering to the needs of another person. However, often the codependent individual can never do enough, and their attempts are neglected and resented by those they cater to.
The codependent person then feels inadequate, feeling like they need to do more. Doing more often does not work, and the codependent individual turns to denial, rationalization, and projection. “As these defenses are used more often, persons become unable to recognize their true feelings, and they become unable to understand and take care of their own personal needs.”[iii]
This is where we have a lot of compassion because it ends up feeling very disorientating – something doesn’t feel right, but you can’t figure out what or why.
At the same time, what’s confusing is that there are parts of this that are normal – taking care of others is a good thing, right? And I feel better about myself when my hubby is distressed and I can help him find joy again.
The key here is recognizing there is so much ‘catering to’ that it is dysfunctional.
So, your spouse just blew it.
Again!
How can you move from the place of being offended – and maybe feeling like a victim – to feeling like you’ve moved the dial on your marriage in a positive direction?
We’ve all been in that situation where we’ve been offended by our spouse – when what we heard hurt us. But, what is it that we hear and feel that hurts? Once you understand what’s coming at you, you can learn how to respond accurately.
Some messages that we get from our spouse hurt more than others. Why do some hurtful messages have a greater impact? The Difference Between Intentional and Unintentional Offensive Statements This research will seem pretty obvious to you, I’m sure, but I think it needs to be stated too, just so we can see what is actually happening.
In 2000, researchers concluded that intentionally hurtful statements were more impactful than unintentional statements. Specifically:
Intentionally hurtful statements have more of a distancing effect on the relationship Intentionally hurtful statements make the recipient feel less satisfied with the relationship When these statements are ongoing, that also has the effect of distancing Feeling disregarded added to the effect of distancing and created more hurt feelings.[i]
We’ve had clients in counseling say to us, “Yeah, I know I was just saying that to be mean or to hurt him.”
Think about that for a moment. We are mean for a number of different reasons, but often we just want to be heard or acknowledged or understood. We fire a barb in there so that we can actually hook into our spouse. Unfortunately, the effect of that is distancing even though the very thing we’re wanting is closeness.
It just doesn’t work.
There is another lesson here when you’re on the receiving end, and that is to ask: was this intentionally hurtful or unintentionally hurtful?
I know I’ve said things to Caleb that were never intended to hurt but they did. Either it was completely innocent (at best) or just not thoughtful (at worst) – albeit I didn’t start out determined to hurt him.
Other times, yeah, couples do get mean with each other. And that’s wrong.
So, if you’re issuing these hurtful statements we have two challenges for you. The first is to download the worksheet (see box below).
The second challenge is more difficult. In Ephesians 4:29, Paul says, “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.” The challenge here is that this verse doesn’t just apply during the potluck supper at church. This needs to be true for all of your conversations – including the conversations in your marriage.
This is what we call a ‘project verse’ because we’re working on implementing this ALWAYS and without exception. But where do we make the most exceptions for this? With our family! This command from Scripture doesn’t list any exceptions though. So we want to challenge you specifically to start obeying this command in your marriage today!
It’s a challenge to have zero corrupting talks and 100% what is good and builds up and gives grace to your spouse. Types of Offensive Statements So, how else do we get offended?
What we’re hoping here is that by labelling and describing these things you’ll be able to take ownership of your own unhelpful behaviours and that your spouse will be willing to do the same. Here are some types of statements that offend us:
Relationship Denigration – making it sound like the relationship is not important or valuable. Humiliation – making your spouse feel shame Verbal/Nonverbal Aggression – speaking in a mean way, forcefully or hostilely Intrinsic Flaw – making your spouse feel like something is wrong with their character Shock – saying things for impact, or saying surprising things Ill-Conceived Humor – being malicious, involves teasing that isn’t funny Mistaken Intent – reflecting that you have been misunderstood or mischaracterized...
Talking to each other seems like a pretty obvious topic, right? But, how many times have I asked Caleb, about a couple we’re working with, “Do they not talk???”
This is a really fundamental issue that we see in most marriages we help. Folks are simply not having the basic day-to-day conversations they need to, and as a result, there are misunderstandings, miscommunications, and then conflict! If we can just make sure we talk about these essential subjects, we can save ourselves a whole lot of pain!
One of Caleb and my earliest fights, when we were dating, was just because we hadn’t clearly communicated our expectations and plans. And let me tell you, it was a good fight...or bad fight, depending on how you phrase it! One of the things we’ve learned to do over the years which saves us a ton of grief is just to talk frequently about what’s going on.
This talking is not always profound – but just about what’s happening, who’s going where, and what our expectations are around that. It’s really just collaborating about the busyness of life.
This is where we jump into the research because reduced communication is actually associated with troubled marriages. Reduced Communication Frequency is Associated with Troubled Marriages One study we looked at found that greatly reduced the quantity of communication in a marital relationship is associated with lowered marital satisfaction.
The researchers asked the question, “Can reduced communication serve as a reliable marker to identify marriages which are in trouble?”[i] The study looked at 26 individuals who reported low to moderate marriage satisfaction as well as 93 divorced individuals. They then measured the amount and topic of communication each individual participated in within their marriage or past marriage.
They found that the data from divorced individuals is very similar to that of married individuals who are less satisfied with their marriages. "The results suggest that less satisfied married individuals’ and divorced individuals’ reports … are very similar. Given these results, reduced communication in a marriage should be considered a probable marker variable indicating a marriage under stress.”[ii]
The point here is that it’s really important to the long term viability of your marriage to make sure that you are talking to each other frequently. It’s also more than just a viability issue though: it actually will improve the quality of your marriage too.
It’s one thing to make a marriage last. It’s another to make it enjoyable! More Frequent Conversation is Associated with Higher Marital Quality Another study looked at nearly 400 married people to understand the connection between the frequency of conversation and marital quality. They measured four relationship characteristics to determine marital quality: liking, satisfaction, commitment, and trust. Those are all key ingredients in a happy marriage.
Not surprisingly they found that the more frequently couples communicated, the greater the quality of their marriage.[iii]
So, we want YOU to really be thinking about growing the frequency of your communicating in order to make your marriage last and to make it more enjoyable!
There are three parts to this though:
First, you have to be communicating Then, you need to look at HOW you’re communicating Finally, we’ll tell you WHAT you need to be communicating about.
The Five Universal Rules of Social Communication So, how should we communicate? A study from 2004 suggests that while the frequency of conversation is important, how couples go about these conversations is even more important.[iv]
It turns out that quality of communication, as measured by the five universal rules of social communication (see below), was also positively related with all four measure of marital quality (liking, satisfaction, commitment, and trust).
The five universal rules of communication are:
One should be polite One should try to make it a pleasant encounter
Betrayal is such a ground-shaking event. Probably because it so deeply challenges your beliefs about someone incredibly significant in your life, and that, in turn, challenges your beliefs about yourself. So: what does the road forward, after betrayal, look like?
Unfortunately, betrayal is a journey that every couple goes through at one time or another. It is sometimes something as severe as an affair but other times, it can just be that we’ve let our spouse down in the every-day-living of life. If you’re in this place as either the betrayer or betrayed, you’ll definitely benefit from this article today.
If the betrayal in your life is a recent event, the pain you’re experiencing may be so fresh and raw that this information will be difficult for you to process. If that’s the case, after you read this, bookmark this page and come back to it in a little while. Give yourself permission to grieve and hurt and heal. The Three Stages of Recovery from a Marital Betrayal Betrayal is defined as “the perceived violation of an implicit or explicit relationship-relevant norm.”[i] It may not be that you, as a couple, have ever spoken about this “norm”, but the fact is you perceive it to be in place, and when your spouse violates it or crosses that line, you feel violated.
When a spouse “knowingly departs from the norms of decency and fairness that are assumed to govern a relationship, thereby causing harm,”[ii] betrayal has taken place. This can be something as simple as secrecy. Sometimes we think that there is no harm if our spouse doesn’t know what we’re doing, but in fact, secrecy is more damaging than most things.
I have heard wives of porn-addicts say over and over that the porn use hurt, but it was the secrecy and lies that were the most damaging. “If he lied/hid this, how do I know if I can ever trust him again?” is a question I hear a lot of.
The definitions of betrayal (above) may sound rather technical, but don’t let that take away from the severity of the experience. I know, for example, that over half of the spouses who find out their spouse has had a secret porn addiction develop most of the symptoms of PTSD. Betrayal can be a very, very traumatic experience.
What makes is even more difficult is that betrayal is something we don’t want to disclose to our support network – really, it would be a betrayal for them too – and so we carry it alone. How can a marriage recover from something like this? Recovery from a marital betrayal is a process that goes through three stages.[iii]
In the First Stage couples must grapple with the effects of the betrayal on themselves and the relationship. This is the Impact Stage of Recovery, and it is characterized by the following responses:
The betrayed spouse realizes that important assumptions about their marriage have been disrupted.[iv] The betrayed spouse must process various violated assumptions including: (1) “beliefs that one’s spouse can be trusted, (2) that the relationship is safe, (3) that one can predict how one’s spouse will behave, (4) that one has reasonable control over one’s own relationship, and so on”[v] Injured spouses no longer can trust their assumptions to guide their daily interactions or to predict future events.[vi]
During the impact stage, the injured spouse often withdraws from the relationship to protect themselves. This is not necessarily a bad thing as it may help the betrayer seek proper help and recovery as they grasp the significance of what they have done.
Betrayal has a huge impact on a relationship, and the betrayed spouse’s ability to think about their marriage as well as their personal life. Everything they thought was truth, has been turned upside down. The effect is traumatic.
To move forward, both partners must move through the next two stages of recovery. Stage Two is called the Meaning Stage of Recovery in which the injured spouse seeks to “discover why the betrayal occurred in order to make the partner’s behavior more understand...
Conflict can be such a painful, frustrating experience. Is it really possible to turn conflict into an opportunity to grow closer rather than it being a catalyst to push you further apart?
Both Caleb and the research think it’s possible!
This topic was spawned by the question, “How can we do conflict as if we’re passionate about solving the same problem instead of having it something that’s against each other?”
So, today we give you a new perspective on conflict – a perspective that is concrete but unique. Fighting Together: Understanding a Collaborative Conflict Style The first thing we want to discuss is the conflict style. People think their fighting style is part of their personality, but really it’s just much more of a habit. If you don’t have the right style, the first thing you need to do is change your style!
A very insightful study from a couple years ago helps us to understand the nature of conflict and how collaborative conflict styles compare to other styles of conflict resolution.[i]
First off, you need to understand that conflict is what happens when one person perceives the other person is frustrating their own concerns. Whenever I get in the way, prevent, obstruct or interfere with your actions – then we have conflict going on.
Inside of conflict, there are two dimensions at play. The first is assertiveness, or how concerned you are with your own outcomes. The second dimension is cooperativeness – how concerned you are with the outcomes of your spouse. The following styles describe how each dimension plays off the other.
The best style is the collaborative style. This style is high on both dimensions; it is assertive and it is cooperative. It looks like openness, the free exchange of information and a steady resolve to produce win-win solutions where the needs of both parties are met. This happens when we place equal emphasis on my interests and your interests.
There are two not-so-great styles: avoidance and accommodation. Avoidance is low on both dimensions, so you never really get to the bottom of things but you probably don’t have a lot of conflict, or else it’s not very intense. Accommodation is where you are low on assertive behaviour and high on cooperative behaviour, which will probably lead to the “doormat” feeling.
The worst style is the competitive style which is where you are high on assertiveness and low on cooperativeness.
Rather than give you our opinions about each style, we’re going to stick with the research here. A study completed in 2000 showed that a “collaborative conflict management style has the highest correlation with both marital satisfaction and spousal satisfaction with conflict management in the marriage.”[ii]
In contract, where one or both of the spouses used the competitive conflict management style, the lowest marital satisfaction was reported.
Think about your style right now. Which style do you use? The next time you find yourself in conflict, try to use the collaborative style where you’re both asserting your own needs and also attending to cooperating with your spouse’s needs. This is the start of how you shift to fighting the problem itself instead of fighting each other. Fighting is Also About Goals The next part that comes into play is goals. As couples, we usually have no idea this part is going on! We just talked about styles and how that impacts conflict, but we also have these goals that account for this other dimension of our conflict.
Basically, all behaviour is goal-directed, BUT, in the middle of an argument, we often don’t know what our goals are. And, just to make life more confusing for our spouse, our goals may change partway through arguments, too.
Here’s a real-life example which some of you may be able to relate to… “Consider a relatively common conflict: a couple arguing over directions while traveling…Both partners want to get to the destination, and neither seems to benefit from arguing about directions. Yet,
The definition of mixed feelings: Watching your mother-in-law drive off a cliff in your brand new car.
Ha ha ha. We all joke about the infamous mother-in-law, but life with her doesn’t actually have to be so terrible.
Here are three ideas for how to structure your relationship, as a couple, with your parents and in-laws for the greatest benefit to your marriage.
Before we begin, we have a few caveats: if you or your spouse has a parent with a personality disorder, or with substance abuse issues, or even with a non-diagnosable challenge (such as really poor boundaries), you are going to have to take what we say and really scrutinize it carefully to see what will work for you and what won’t.
Another reality is that some of you are taking care of aging parents in your home. Again, you’re going to have to nuance what we say here to your situation because there are stresses related to caregiving that would be in effect if that was anybody in your home, never mind a parent or in-law.
None of us have perfect in-laws nor are we going to be perfect in-laws ourselves; but today we speak to the broader context of having reasonably healthy, imperfect parents and in-laws.
Getting Along With Your Mother in Law Yes, cows do fly. This bonus worksheet is morethan just tips – it gets you thinking through some of the challenges around your in-law relationships and considering new ways of coming to those problems. You don’t want to miss this download!I Want It! How In-laws Influence a Marriage You may be asking the question, “So, I have a few issues with my in-laws – does that actually impact my marriage?”
The research says, “Yes! It does.” A study from 2001 looked at the marital success compared to discord with in-laws in nearly 300 wives and 300 husbands. They found that:
“The quality of the in-law relationship did predict the stability, satisfaction, and commitment expressed by the spouses in the study.” It is hard to predict causation, but in plain English they are saying that your in-laws can make your marriage painful. For wives specifically, your perception of marital success is predicted by discord with mother-in-laws (MIL) and father-in-laws (FIL). For husbands specifically, this was only noted with the relationship towards the FIL.[i]
We’re not sure why there is a difference there, but the point is that it is helpful to your marriage to have good relationships with your in-laws! It doesn’t mean that if you don’t, your marriage is going to fail, but there is an impact there and it is measurable. So, if your spouse is complaining about your parents and the relationship, you need to take that seriously.
We’ve now seen that in-laws definitely influence marriage satisfaction, so let’s look at three principles that should guide our in-law relationships. Principle 1: The Autonomy of Family Units When marriage was established at the beginning of creation, God’s instructions were that a man should leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife.
Now, exactly what that looks like is going to be largely informed by your culture. We’re speaking out a white, north American background here, so if you’re from another culture the same principle is true, but how you might apply it will look a little different – keep that in mind!
The research comes to a very similar conclusion: “The new family has the task of forming a stronger, autonomous bond than the two from which the partners originated. If partners are unable to accomplish this task, their union may be threatened.”[ii]
It was even studied way back in 1954 and found that marriages were more likely to be cohesive if the couple was autonomous and had little conflict with their parents.[iii]
So the research and the biblical principle are aligned, and that is where I am pointing out that we need to observe this principle of autonomy.
The predominant responsibility is on the man to leave and cleave. This is leadership, but he is especially responsible to make his bond to hi...
On the Marriage Podcast for Smart People we don’t often talk about parenting. But when it’s impacting your marriage, then it’s our business!
Fighting over kids, or parenting issues is a very common source of marital conflict. It’s common, but it’s also really frustrating and it can be a tough rut to get out of.
A further negative of this fighting situation though, is that disagreements on childrearing can actually have negative effects on your children’s wellbeing. It’s not just a source of conflict between you and your spouse, but it can also put a burden on your children too.
To help you, as parents, align, and to make things easier on your kids, we have a few ideas for you to try that we know will help. Show a United Front When Parenting Research has shown that children react to incongruent parenting styles with various emotional and behavioural problems including anxiety, depression, aggression, and rule-breaking.[i]
Results of that study showed that when children perceive a lot of difference between maternal and paternal parenting, it has a negative effect on the child’s emotional and behavioural well-being.
These results display the importance of parents working together in the face of child-rearing disagreements to display a united and congruent front to their children. Kids are way smarter that we all think they are. They’re using their brains way sooner than we think they are, too. Developmentally, babies and toddlers are picking up on parenting differences before they can talk and possibly even before they can walk. A united front is essential with children of all ages.
You’re probably thinking, how can we show a united front when that is precisely the problem: we aren’t united!? Here are some ideas. Flexible/Inflexible Areas Help Clarify Parenting Priorities Caleb has used this intervention with many couples (including premarital couples only just thinking about raising kids) and it is a huge help.
It’s an exercise from Dr. Gottman, and we call it flexible/inflexible areas.
Take a blank sheet of paper, and on it draw a circle as large as you can. Inside that, you’ll draw another circle, about the size of the largest coin in your currency.
In the small circle write two words: inflexible area.
In the large circle, write two words: flexible area.
When you are disagreeing with your spouse, ultimately all of the content of your disagreement falls into one of these circles. The flexible area has all the little reasons you give but, at the end of the day, you would be willing to compromise on. The inflexible area is the core, essential thing you are trying to protect. This is something that you cannot and will not budge on.
Before we figure out how to sort things out, let’s look at why most people never get to the bottom of their parenting arguments:
They only talk about the details of the flexible area They try to make the flexible area – things they would otherwise compromise on – as large as possible so that they can protect the inflexible area They don’t talk about the inflexible area – the one area that they most need to discuss openly. Or, they stuff as much of the flexible items into the inflexible area and make it seem so big that they are totally stuck, even on little things – and often come across as unreasonable during a disagreement.
If you want to start working together instead of against each other, you have to bring the absolute core of that inflexible area out into the light and share it with your spouse. That’s you saying something like, “I’m willing to be flexible on all sorts of things, but this is the one thing that I cannot see myself compromising on.” And then tell your spouse why – it’s probably something from your childhood that informs this inflexible area.
Here’s the key! You don’t have to have alignment or agreement on the inflexible areas, you both just have to agree to honour each other’s inflexible areas.
Now, instead of fighting about the kids you’ve said what is s...
Episode #100! Wahoo!!!
Normally we focus on real-world, research-based strategies to help your marriage. Today, we’re mostly just going to stop and reflect on our podcast and www.onlyyouforever.com and talk a little about our future plans.
But, this being the marriage podcast for smart people, hosted by a research-guru…we couldn’t have no research! So here’s the research, and if you want all our nitty-gritty details, you’ll have to listen to the audio.
What Caleb and I do is called copreneurialism. An entrepreneur is a person who runs his or her own business. Copreneurs are when a husband/wife team start and run a business. So, that’s what we are!
According to the research, about 14% of households in the USA have their own business. Of those, about 30% are husband-wife teams.[i]
Here are some possible tensions for being in business together (and our responses in brackets). As I said, more details are on the podcast.
Underestimating the tensions (we’re guilty) Boundaries (ok) Conflict (a little) Roles (a struggle) Neglect of personal needs (didn’t exercise for 18 months) Inequitable division of responsibility (feel that) Time and financial pressures (for sure) Loss of ability for the uninvolved spouse to act as a sounding board for new ideas or for ways to reduce work tension (not a problem).[ii]
That’s all the research for today. Short and sweet! If you want more details, or are curious about what’s ahead for www.onlyyouforever.com listen to episode 100 of the Marriage Podcast for Smart People.
But before I go, I just have to give you guys the credit. It’s exciting to hit episode 100, but if it wasn’t for you guys, we wouldn’t have made it. We give you the info, and sometimes push you WAY outside your comfort zone, but YOU are the ones putting it into practice in your marriage. You are the real heroes making your marriage something you love today and will treasure for a lifetime! Kudos!
[i] Glenn Muske et al., “The Intermingling of Family and Business Financial Resources: Understanding the Copreneurial Couple,” Journal of Financial Counseling & Planning 20, no. 2 (December 2009): 27–47.
[ii] Ibid.
Why does it seem to be so difficult to create time to spend together? We all want to spend more time with our spouse and do more together, but so often it doesn’t fit into the schedule and we don’t quite get around to doing it.
Sometimes the truth hurts. Today we’re going to give you two key strategies for creating more time with your spouse – what you can actually do to create the time together that you want to have. The first one is really helpful. The second one is also very helpful, but it could be rather painful… The Importance of Making Time For Your Spouse Numerous studies support the idea that spending time with your spouse is important to the health of your marriage. That’s no shock!
One study looked at 280 couples and how much time they spent together. They came back to those same couples fives years later to see how they were doing. The study found a positive relationship between shared leisure time and marital stability (the marriage enduring to the end of the five years). On the other hand, marital dissolution (divorce or separation) was associated with less shared leisure time.[i]
The two activities most associated with marital stability were recreation (active recreation activities such as bowling, swimming, skating, skiing, fishing, boating, camping, and pleasure drives) and TV Watching.[ii]
The first one I understand, but the last one surprised me! Caleb and I are biased against the consumption of TV. From what we hear listening to other couples though, it seems that some couples get really into the story of shows together and that becomes a point of common interest, discussion, interaction etc. But we don’t know!
What do you think? Do you find that watching TV is a positive, shared point of contact between you? What do you watch? What does that do for you? Let us know here or in the comments below.
Leisure time is also associated with greater marital satisfaction. Another study states that the most satisfied couples spend about 50 percent more waking hours with each other than the least satisfied couples.[iii]
These are just two studies but it is common sense and supported by the research that spending time together makes for a more satisfying marriage. So What Makes Spending Time Together So Hard? A study in 2011 looked at just over 4000 households to determine what household characteristics predicted couples’ time together. The results highlighted two areas that were significantly correlated with spending less time together:
long working hours, and small children in the household.[iv]
Interestingly, they found that the differences between the ability for single-earner and dual-earner couples to spend time together was small – as soon as one spouse has to go to work, it becomes difficult to do things together.
Obviously, we can’t all quit our jobs to spend time with our spouse… so what can we do? What You Can Do to Spend More Time With Your Spouse Here are two strategies for you to think about. The first is to look at your roadblocks and then redefine them as opportunities. The second is to do the harder, value-laden work of deciding what is most important to you. That’s where we get to the more painful stuff. Redefine Seemingly Unmoveable Restraints as Possible to Work Around Every couple has “restraints” to work around. Restraints being all of the activities they are required to complete in a day – things like work, school, childcare, housework, etc. All these demands can appear inflexible and impossible to work around, but are they?
Fein said that couples can create more leisure time together by…[v]
Postponing housework Arranging alternative care for children Taking paid or unpaid leave Doing nonmarket activities together (work that is unpaid such as housework and childcare) Reassess who contributes to housework and other household demands Connecting at different times. For example, Caleb would love to connect after supper, but with little munchkins around that wasn’t poss...
My cousins boss and the boss’ wife went fishing one day. It was the first time in a long time they were doing something together rather than him working and being on the phone ALL day. Apparently, his phone rang so he answered it (which fellows, was the wrong thing to do!), so his wife grabbed the phone and pitched it as far into the ocean as she could throw.
Is the cell phone becoming a problem in your marriage? We certainly struggle with this! Thankfully it hasn't quite got to the point of throwing our phones into the ocean... What Do We Know About Mobile Phone Addiction? The research is just starting to come out and researchers are just beginning to understand the basics of mobile phone addiction, including how we develop this addiction and the impact it has on our lives.
Some of you younger ones probably don’t have any concept of a world without cell phones, but I still remember our first phone, and I still remember our first iPhone! These new technologies hit the market, met a need, and we rely on them so heavily. Only now are we starting to step back and ask how this is impacting lives beyond the convenience factor.
One journal article that was a literature review of problematic cell phone use concluded that mobile phone use may become uncontrolled or excessive which impacts daily living. It pointed out evidence to show a behavioural addiction is possible and this would impact social, familial and professional life.(Billieux, 2012)[i]
In that study, Billieux noted three typical areas of problems:
Dangerous use: tendency to use the mobile phone while driving Prohibited Use: tendency to use the mobile phone in banned places Dependence Symptoms: loss of control, negative affects in situations in which the use of the phone is not possible or allowed. People are actually losing it a bit if they can’t use their phone.
Another study connected mobile phone addiction with additional qualities found in substance abuse addiction including:
Tolerance: increasing frequency and duration of cellular phone use to obtain the same level of psychological satisfaction as earlier. (Taneja, 2014) Withdrawal: feelings of nervousness and anxiety when away from one’s cell phone or when unable to use it (Taneja, 2014), using the phone to escape other problems and negative consequences in all areas of life. Financial: the tendency to use the mobile phone to the extent it incurs enormous changes and financial issues for the individual (Billieux, 2012).[ii]
These are serious things. That’s why we’ve started saying that phone addiction is the new alcoholism. Who Tends to Develop Mobile Phone Addictions? Studies show that women use mobile phones more than men, especially when it comes to text messaging. Other studies have found that women are more prone to experience dependence on the mobile phone, while men have a greater tendency to use the mobile phone while driving.
Problematic mobile phone use has been associated with personality areas of neuroticism (tendency to be emotionally unstable) and extraversion (tendency to be sociable). It has also been associated with the trait of impulsivity. (Billieux, 2012)
Based on our personality types, some of us are going to have to be extra cautious about our cell phone usage. I am one of those people.
All the research so far has been about the general use of cell phones – not marriage research. However, we do have a study that discusses the impact of internet usage on marriage, and I think that it’s not unreasonable to extrapolate from internet use to phone use as most people have smartphones nowadays. How Internet Usage Impacts a Marriage Researchers studied 199 newlywed couples who had been married an average of one month. They looked at associations between frequency of internet use, compulsive internet behaviours, and various relationship factors such as loneliness, passion, intimacy, and commitment. They were really trying to get a broad sense of how internet use might be impa...
Sometimes we ask more philosophical questions about the future of our marriages. One of those is that age-old question, do opposites attract? It turns out they do – and they don’t... How confusing is that!
The research actually seems very contradictory over the whole opposites/similarities thing until you start to pull it apart carefully. Which is what Caleb loves to do… :)
This topic actually came from a concern from one of our listeners, and we’ve heard it echoed elsewhere – that uncertainty of “our marriage is struggling and we’re just so different. Can this really work out for us?”
Spoiler Alert: Yes, it can! It may just take a bit more work… Do Opposites Attract? Let’s try to answer this question. People say opposites attract but is that the case? Well, when it comes to the methods people use to choose their future spouse, some research suggests that people tend to look for individuals who are similar to themselves and who represent their ideal preferences for a romantic partner.
In 2003, 978 individuals completed a two-part questionnaire. They “first rated the importance they placed on 10 attributes in a long-term spouse and then rated their perception of themselves on those same attributes.”[i] These attributes were grouped into four categories: wealth and status, family commitment, physical appearance, and sexual fidelity.
The results showed that people looked for a spouse who was similar to themselves. This makes it look like people don’t attract opposites until you really look at the four categories.
These categories are based on values, appearance, and socioeconomic status. In those ways, we often do look for someone similar to ourselves. What Happens When You Marry Your Opposite? Despite the fact that the previous research supports a “likes-attracts rule”, many people end up married to someone who is their opposite. When we look at the research on whether opposites or similar get along better, there’s some interesting conclusions.
Unfortunately, there’s no straight answer to this question. Some research suggests that similar couples are happier and other studies suggest that too much similarity can lead to difficulties in the marriage. The research is conflicting! Marrying Your Opposite Can Lead to Lower Marital Satisfaction One study we looked at said that opposites don’t work as well. The researchers supported the idea that personality similarities are positively related to marital quality.
They measure marital quality and personality in a sample of 291 newlyweds.
Marital quality is the usual stuff like measuring intimacy, how they handle conflict, how agreed they are on different areas of life, etc.
Personality was measured using the Five-Factor Personality Inventory which looks at the five factors of:
Extraversion: level of sociability and enthusiasm Agreeableness: level of friendliness and kindness Conscientiousness: level of organization and work ethic Emotional stability: level of calmness and tranquility Intellect/autonomy: level of creativity and curiosity
The results showed a positive association between personality similarity and marital quality. So, the more similar these newlywed couples were, the greater their marital quality.[ii] Dissimilar Personalities Can Lead to More Passionate Relationships However, other research suggests that this is not always the case! A study from 2007 investigated three things in 137 couples: relationship onset (love at firs sight vs. gradually becoming involved), personality (same 5 measure as above), and relationship quality.[iii]
Results of the study showed that “partners who fell in love at first sight…showed more dissimilar personalities”.[iv] However, it also found that “individuals prefer to select partners with similar personalities as themselves, but that they only succeed in doing so when they have the opportunity and time to get to know each other.”[v] Also, “partners who fell in love, at first sight,
Not every Christian couple feels guilty about sex, but a surprising number do. In fact, we’ve even been asked the question, “I’m married now, but I really, really look forward to and enjoy sex with my husband. Is that OK or is there something wrong with that?”
To give you some context here, our moral convictions are that sex is intended for married couples only but inside of that marriage bond, it is intended to be enjoyed and explored in a way that grows and deepens and becomes a richer and richer experience over the lifespan of one’s marriage.
So, we’re not here to try to help you get comfortable with extra-marital sex or polygamy or anything else that falls outside the bounds of healthy marriage sex.
Yet, in coming to this issue, we’re not only speaking to couples today to try to encourage you to embrace the full opportunity of being sexual with your spouse, but also to those who lead our churches and who teach about marriage and who speak to young people about chastity: we need to be very careful how we talk about sex to make sure that while we communicate the boundaries that God has placed on sexuality, we also communicate the blessing part as well.
Caleb talked to a guy who once said, “I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve had sex in our many years of marriage.” The issue there was the teaching that she had received that sex was dirty and wrong and bad, and when she finally found herself in a situation where it was legitimate, she just couldn’t flip that switch.
We’ve also heard from a wife in our survey telling us that she lives in a sexless marriage and it’s tearing her heart out. He’s a great guy but has the same hang up.
Something needs to change with regards to guilty feelings about sex. Let’s start by looking at the impact of religion on sexuality. The Impact of Religion on Sexuality Over the past few decades, many research studies have been completed on the correlations between religion and specific sexual attitudes and experiences.
In 1970, Masters and Johnson examined how religious upbringing affected sexual arousal, orgasm, sexual satisfaction, and pain during sex. Their results were published in the classic book Human Sexual Inadequacy and was cited by Woo (2012). They found that a “strict religious upbringing in Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism was associated with different types of sexual dysfunction.”[i] These sexual dysfunctions included:
Impotence: erectile dysfunction Anorgasmia: inability to achieve orgasm despite adequate stimulation Vaginismus: painful spasms in the vagina during sexual intercourse.
These are all very real issues. Other Christian sex therapists also point to strict, anti-sexual teaching from our pulpits as one of the root causes of these types of sexual dysfunction.
If you’re out there and you’re experiencing pain during intercourse, or you can’t get an erection or experience orgasm because of the feelings of guilt and shame that arise whenever you think about your private parts of feel attracted to your spouse, you’re not alone.
Not only are you not alone, there’s probably actually nothing physically wrong with you. You may have just been so burdened by unhealthy messaging that it’s affecting your body’s ability to respond appropriately to what is legitimate.
Maybe in your head, you can believe that sex with your spouse is good but you can’t get your heart and body to follow. Or, maybe it’s been so hammered into you, that you can’t even accept that sex is possibly a good thing, never mind one of God’s greatest gifts to married humanity.
Sex Without Shame If you’re having trouble experiencing sexual arousal because of feelings of guilt, this audio track explains what is going on and what you can do about it so that you can move towards embracing the blessing that sex can be to your marriage. Become a patron today to listen to this track!Listen Now! The Problem of Sexual Guilt and Shame What is the reason for these complications between religi...
Do you ever fight about who does what in marriage? Or, how decisions are made? Who has the most say, or power, or who can make the final call on some decisions?
Most of the time these disagreements come down to the model of marriage we hold to: and when that’s different than the model our spouse holds, conflict is inevitable.
Power structure is a topic that is fundamental to marriage. Rarely though, do we actually sit down to discuss our model of marriage when we’re dating or engaged or newly married. So, let’s look at the three models of marriage, how they impact marital satisfaction and then what we do and recommend. Power Structures in Marriage Christian authors have come to various interpretations on the Bible’s teachings about how men and women should relate with one another in marriage. Many of these interpretations center around the issue of gender roles and what the Bible means when it speaks of headship and submission. At the end of the day, it really comes down to power.
Various models have been created to explain how husbands and wives should function together in the areas of decision making, work, and leadership (which, when we’re distressed as a couple is usually not about leadership but about the much less noble but more pragmatic issue: power).
Here’s a rundown of three models of marriage. View #1: Authoritarianism
Husbands hold unlimited authority and leadership. Wives are expected to respond with unqualified submission. As leaders and heads of the house, husbands have unlimited say in all decision and wives are not permitted to question the husband’s leadership in any situation.[i]
What we see happening in these marriages is that the wife gains power and influence in other ways: withholding sex, using Scriptures to manipulate, guilting her husband, etc. However, there are authoritarian marriages where both spouses buy into the model and both are very happy. It is easy to get judgmental of this kind of marriage, but if it’s working for two people and she has chosen this model as much as he has, who are we to take it away from them or say it’s wrong? View #2: Complementarianism
Upholds the equality of men and women, while simultaneously recognizing the different roles, strengths, and weaknesses each gender brings to the marriage. Men hold headship in the marriage while upholding their call to love their wives. Women act as helpers while upholding their call to submit to their husbands. (Helpers is the word from the author, we do not endorse that word) Decisions are made jointly, except in rare causes of an impasse when final decision making is given to the husband.[ii]
View #3: Egalitarianism
Men and women not only live as equals, but any hierarchy or headship in the marriage is erased. Distinctions in gender differences are downplayed or removed completely in favor of recognizing our oneness in Christ and joint calling to do His work. All decisions are made together.[iii]
In each of these models, roles are an issue, as is the degree to which we acknowledge or bypass gender issues. Decision making and power are also critical.
Power Struggles? To help you understand your own situation better, we have an assessment worksheet you can download which also gives you ways to discuss those sticky topics with your spouse.Get It Nowt! Beliefs vs. Practice An interesting study was completed using data from the 1996 Religious Identity and Influence Survey to “examine the relationship between religious identity, gender ideology, and marital decision making.” The results of this study showed that:
Conservative Protestants profess a traditional gender-role ideology that the husband is the head of the family and the leader in making decisions, BUT the actual decision-making strategies they practice are similar to other religious groups who profess more liberal ideologies. Theologically liberal Protestants profess a more egalitarian ideology in terms of decision making BUT the actual deci...
Did you know that some of the very things you do to try to save your distressed marriage are in actual fact destroying it? Seriously. What is even more shocking is that they exist in every marriage.
One of those things that we see everyday is called the pursue-withdraw cycle.
Very simply, you have:
A pursuer: I am going to keep coming at you because I am afraid of losing you. Negative emotional connection feels better than no connection.
And a distancer: I am overwhelmed, I can’t fix this. Maybe if I retreat (withdraw), it’ll be calmer and I won’t lose him/her.
See how they both are trying to keep each other?
Unfortunately, things don’t work out the way each spouse is hoping. The pursuer desperately wants connection, but instead prompts distance. The distance also wants connection (but with the calm, soft part of his/her spouse) and by withdrawing prompts anger and attacking.
For Caleb and me, this is what it looks like:
I flood Caleb with a ton of emotions. I don’t necessarily start out mad, but I’m usually loud and have tears. I just want him to understand how huge this is for me, and how much I hurt.
All he sees is the loud part of me, and he feels completely overwhelmed. He is just trying to process everything, and would love to find a hole to hide in until I blow over as he doesn’t like to see me upset.
He doesn’t respond, so I get louder and (usually, mad by now) try to break through his calm exterior.
It really is a spiral that can escalate quickly. We both want each other, but our ways to attain it are pushing each other away.
So, how does this demand-withdraw pattern work? The Nature of the Demand/Withdraw Pattern The demand-withdraw pattern can be defined in the following way: “One member (the demander) criticizes, nags, and makes demands of the other, while the partner (the withdrawer) avoids confrontation, withdraws, and becomes silent.”[i]
Eldridge et al (2007) studied this demand-withdraw pattern in 128 couples who were divided into three groups: severely distressed, moderately distressed, and nondistressed. The researchers used self-report and video-taped discussions of relationship problem topics and analyzed them to come to the following results:
The more distressed the couple, the more demand/withdraw tactics they used. The pattern of wife-demand/husband-withdraw was more common than husband-demand/wife-withdraw.[ii]
There are a small group of couples that demand-demand or withdraw-withdraw. The first looks very volatile. The last looks like one nasty storm cloud that never actually does anything. It could also be just a plain/stony feel to the marriage.
So, typically, most marriages have a wife that finds herself demanding and a husband that withdraws. Hence the proverbial man-cave and the proverbial nagging wife. They’re proverbial for a reason: we all do this!
Research completed in 2009 gives further information on demand-withdraw patterns. The researchers studied “116 couples who completed diary ratings of instances of marital conflict occurring at home.”[iii] The results of these diary ratings were as follows:
The individual who initiated the conflict predicted the demand-withdraw pattern. When husbands initiated the conflict it led to the husband-demand/wife-withdraw pattern. When wives initiated conflict, it led to the wife-demand/husband-withdraw. Demand-withdraw patterns were more likely when disagreements concerned the marital relationship, and less likely when it was disagreements about issues outside the relationship. Demand-withdraw patterns were consistently related to greater likelihood of negative tactics (i.e., threat, physical distress, verbal hostility, aggression) and higher levels of negative emotions (i.e., sadness, anger, fear) and to lower likelihood of constructive tactics (i.e., affection, support, problem solving, compromise) and lower levels of positivity.[iv]
In other words, we all do this, and it doesn’t work that well!
So, you want less sex than your spouse does. Is that a problem? Well, it turns out that’s a question for your spouse. But if it is a problem, today we’re going to help you navigate your way through this delicate issue.
Maybe you haven’t heard the terminology ‘low desire versus high desire’. Many marriages will have sexual desire discrepancies in which one spouse desires more sex than the other spouse. Often, but not always, the husband is high desire and the wife is low desire.
If your marriage is the other way around, and the wife is high desire and the husband is low desire, that’s fine too!
There is no judgment on low is bad or high is good, we just need to be aware that in almost every marriage there is a difference in sexual desire. That is not a bad thing. It just is what it is. It can be a pain point though, if we don’t know how to handle it or we think it is a bad thing.
The spouse with low desire often wants to meet the desire of the other spouse, but feels unable to do this when they just don’t desire sex. So what should they do? That’s the dilemma…
Are You the High Desire Spouse? The focus of this post is the low desire spouse – if you’re the high desire spouse, we have a one-page document for you because your role is critical too. Become a patron of our show today and download “Tips for High Desire Spouses” now. The three ideas in the PDF will help you get what you want more of: sex and intimacy.I Want It!
Let’s start by looking at the nature of sexual desire, then the problems that sexual desire discrepancies can cause in marriage and finally look at practical ways in which the low desire spouse can move forward. The Nature of Sexual Desire In 2003, Levine wrote an influential article entitled The Nature of Sexual Desire in which he defines sexual desire as “the sum of the forces that lean towards and away from sexual behavior”[i]. He states that sexual desire is made up on three components:
Drive – “a biological component which has an anatomy and neuroendocrine physiology.” This is just about how you’re made, how you’re wired, and how the chemicals in your body balance out. For example, we know that testosterone levels in men affects sexual desire. Testosterone levels, in turn are affected by things like obesity, depression and more. Motivation – “the psychological component” which is influenced by three things:
Personal mental states such as joy or sorrow. Often we talk about “not being in the mood”. This is usually a reference to how our motivation is affected by our current emotional state. Interpersonal states such as mutual affection, disagreement, or disrespect. How well are we getting along? Or how much non-sexual intimacy are we experiencing? Social contexts such as relationship duration and infidelity – other factors from the circumstances of our lives.
All three of these affect our motivation!
Wish – “the cultural component that reflects values, meanings, and rules about sexual expression that are inculcated in childhood.” This can be huge for people of faith. We hear time and again of couples where a spouse was taught for the first 20 years of his/her life that sex was bad. Then they get married and are expected to become sexually active but cannot switch the belief that “sex is bad” over to “sex is good” because they made some wedding vows.
Issues can come up in one or multiple of these areas to lead to issues in desire: drive, motivation and wish (or beliefs). The Cost of Sexual Desire Discrepancy in a Marriage Now that we know the nature of sexual desire, let’s look at the type of issues that come up when we’re not aligned.
A study in 2014 of 1054 married couples looked at the associations between sexual desire discrepancy and four relationship outcomes (how satisfied the couple was with their marriage, how stable their relationship was, how much conflict they had, and how much positive communication they had)[ii].
The study compared how much sex couples actually had...
What do you do when you want to fix your marriage and your spouse doesn’t think there’s a problem? Or maybe sees the problem but refuses to work on it?
This is a really tough situation to be in where you are really worried about your marriage but your spouse isn’t on board – for whatever reason – with doing anything about fixing it.
This is actually not an uncommon situation. In fact, the research shows that it is a common marital situation for an unhappy spouse to be married to a spouse that is not unhappy. Yes, that is a lot of “un’s” to keep track of! It turns out though that unhappy spouses are much more common than unhappy marriages.
So, you are not the only person out there going through this! In fact, we’ve been through it too. There was a period of time where Caleb was just dragging himself through life – in a cloud of mild depression all the time. I was the unhappy, concerned spouse. Thankfully, Caleb was able to come out of that and we re-engaged, but it was not a happy time for me when he couldn’t see that anything was wrong. The Problem of Unhappy Spouses In 2002, Waite et al completed an extensive study of unhappy spouses using the National Survey of Families and Households. They looked at 645 spouses in the USA who had rated their marriages as unhappy and then re-interviewed them again five years later.
They found that, “while Americans usually talk about unhappy marriages…unhappy spouses were far more common. Only about a quarter of unhappy spouses were married to a spouse who also reported being unhappily married.”[i] The implication being that ¾ of unhappy spouses are married to spouses who are satisfied with their marriages. If you are the unhappy spouse, could you do us a favour and send us a note on our Get In Touch page? We’d love to hear what it’s been like for you – and I promise, if you write to us, we’ll write you back! The statistics also showed that unhappy spouses are more likely to experience symptoms of depression, have lower levels of global happiness, a lower sense of personal mastery, and lower self-esteem than happy spouses. It’s not an easy situation to be in.
I think the most challenging part of being unhappy is the powerlessness associated with it. Like when you’re at someone’s house and their picture isn’t hanging straight but you can’t touch it – only 1000x worse! You can see what needs to be done. You can feel it in your gut. But you can’t change it!
But be encouraged – there is hope for you and your marriage! Hope for Unhappy Spouses The study mentioned above actually looked at the difference between unhappy spouses who decided to stay married and unhappy spouses who decided to get a divorce. They made a couple of important discoveries.
First, “unhappy spouses who divorced or separated actually showed a somewhat higher number of depressive symptoms, compared to unhappily married spouses who stayed married.” Perhaps their most important finding was this: “Two out of three unhappily married adults who avoided divorce or separation ended up happily married five years later.”[ii]
This gives so much hope! If you’re an unhappy spouse who decides to stay committed, over time you will most likely come to a happier place in your relationship!
What are the reasons for this? Obviously, if you’re reading this, you want to be in that two out of three people, so let’s look at some of the common situations that lead to unhappy spouses and how unhappy spouses found happiness in each type of situation. Three Common Causes of Unhappy Spouses
Outside Stressors: Things such as illness, unemployment, depression, financial problems, problems with kids, etc… This was the most common story given by spouses who were interviewed. Their marriage became unhappy because of outside situations that could not be controlled. These are major issues that can insert themselves into our lives at any time. Husband Behaving Badly: These issues included infidelity, alcoholism, fighting, cussing, abuse,
Nobody is exempt from hard times. Sometimes we get hit as a couple and other times it is really just our spouse that bears the brunt of the burden. How can you draw alongside and support your spouse during those hard times?
There is this innate advantage to being a couple in that we have the ability to lift each other up when we fall down. The proverb in the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes puts it this way: “Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up!”
The next question that comes to mind is, “How do I lift up my spouse when they’re down?” Sometimes we’re not sure how to help or sometimes we can even miss the cue when our spouse is asking for support. Other times we get stuck wallowing around in our own stuff and aren’t much use.
Even if we mess up though, we all want to be a spouse that’s really there for their wife or husband. It feels good to know what to do and how to do it and to see your spouse benefit from it.
So, let’s look at the importance of support, and then at how to give the right type and right amount of support. The Importance of Support in Marriage Supporting each other is important for two reasons; not only for the well-being of the spouse who is experiencing the hardship but also for the well-being of your marriage and the intimacy you experience as a couple. It works not only for your spouse but also the bond between you.
A study in 2009 looked at patients with cancer who were married or in intimate relationships. They noticed that these patients often had difficulty talking about cancer-related concerns with their spouse, so they decided to test the effectiveness of an emotional disclosure intervention between patients with GI cancer and their spouses.
130 randomly selected GI cancer patients and their spouses were selected to receive sessions of either partner-assisted disclosure (one spouse disclosing feelings and concerns to their spouse related to the cancer experience – relational and emotional) or couple’s cancer education/support intervention (including information presentations related to living with cancer as well as written handouts – educational and informative).
Results showed that, compared to the education/support sessions, the partner-assisted emotional disclosure led to greater improvements in relationship quality and intimacy.[i] This really underscores the importance of intimacy.
Husbands (although both genders can be prone to this, it is more often seen in males), don’t go on a huge search for facts about the problem when the reality is you need to connect with your wife at the feelings level. That emotional connection is so critical.
As you can see, supporting your spouse is important, but the catch is that not all support is equally helpful. The way in which you support your spouse makes a big difference in whether or not it will bring you closer together. The Kind of Support Really Matters This is where we talk about support preferences.
One important aspect of giving support is something known as “partner sensitivity.” What this means is that you are sensitive to who your spouse is as a person, including his or her unique preferences. Because you know your spouse so well, you know how to support your spouse in a way that matches how your spouse wants to be supported.
Some researchers in 2007, believing that ‘partner sensitivity’ is a key building block for the formation of intimacy, studied the concept in 59 married couples who were videotaped disclosing information to each other. They found that:
“Matching support following the disclosure of emotions was predictive of perceived partner sensitivity.” If your support response was aligned with the way your spouse preferred to receive support, then your spouse will perceive you as being someone who is sensitive to their needs.
We had a couple of people reach out and mention how they got into emotional affairs on Facebook – and almost into physical affairs. They really freaked themselves out and it’s thrown a real wrench into their marriage but they’re working on things now. While we’re not anti-social media, it’s time to realize the huge impact it has on marriage.
Social media is quite a new thing. Given that we don’t have our parents to warn us about the dangers, we have to prepare ourselves for it and also figure out the healthy boundaries we want to put in place to make sure we don’t get caught up in something that we never intended or wanted to happen.
Remember, very few people wake up in the morning and think, “I’m going to go looking to have an affair today.” Rather, it’s something we slide or drift into most of the time and it’s even easier to do that online than it is in person. Internet Use and Romance Let’s look at this generally to start with and then focus in on distraction, jealousy, and infidelity.
A study in 2014 looked at the relationship between social media usage, marriage satisfaction, and divorce rates by looking at surveys of married individuals as well as state-level data from the United States. The study found that:
The use of social media negatively correlated with marriage quality and happiness. (media use up, marriage down) Use of social media positively correlated with experiencing a troubled marriage and considering divorce. (both increased together) They continued to find these correlations even after taking into account various economic, demographic, and psychological variables that are known to be related to marriage well being. This suggests that social media plays a much larger role than we think in our marriages.[i]
Another study from the same year cited another interesting statistic: 1/3 of divorce cases mentioned Facebook. They also noted that the top Facebook concerns are inappropriate messages to individuals of the opposite sex.
That is a very specific use of social media which is detrimental to marriages, but what about social media use in general?
The Pew Research Center did a phone survey of couples on their social media usage and how it affected their relationship. Out of the individuals that they surveyed:
71% of married couples use social networking sites 10% of internet users who are married or partnered say that the internet has had a “major impact” on their relationship, 17% say that is has had a “minor impact” and 72% said that it has “no real impact at all”. Of those who indicate that it did have an impact, 20% said that the impact was mostly negative, 74% said it was mostly positive, and 4% said it was both positive and negative. 8% of internet users in a committed relationship have had an argument with their spouse or partner about the amount of time one of them was spending online. 4% of internet users in a committed relationship have gotten upset at something that they found out their spouse or partner was doing online. These numbers related more closely to relationship tension for younger adults between the ages of 18-29 due to larger consumption of social media.
18% of online 18-29 year olds have argued with a partner about the amount of time one of them spent online (compared with 8% of all online couples) 8% say that they have been upset by something their partner was doing online (compared with 4% of all online couples).[ii]
Now that we have an overview, we can get into some of the details, looking at three different areas in which social media negatively affects marriages. The point here is that you need to think about how and how often you’re using social media and make sure that you and your spouse are both good with this. Distraction and Time In 2007, Young looked at excessive internet use that qualifies as internet addiction. They define internet addiction as “any online-related compulsive behaviour which interferes with normal living and causes sev...
The difference between negativity and positivity in marriage is the difference between a marriage filled with nagging, complaining, and criticism versus a marriage that is filled with affirmation, gratitude, and positive emotions.
Let’s look at how negativity can be damaging to our marriages and then look at some specific strategies for bringing positivity into play. Negativity Impacts Mood and Marital Satisfaction We may not even realize how the negativity we are expressing in our marriages is actually hurting our own mood and marital satisfaction.
There is a really neat study that examined the “saying is experiencing effect.” This phenomenon is pretty much just what it sounds like: you experience what you say or hear. They ran four experiments to look at mood before and after complaining or affirmation. While this study wasn’t specifically for marriage, they found it true to human nature that:
Complaining leads to decreases in mood. Affirmation leads to increases in mood. The effect on mood was equally strong for both complaining and affirmation. This effect was found after listening to others affirm or complain. This effect was also found after hearing one’s own affirming or complaining communication.[i]
Another study that looked at marriages over a 13-year period found that negativity in the marriage was directly associated with marital dissatisfaction. As negativity increased, dissatisfaction with the marriage increased.
This makes it pretty clear that when we bring negativity into our marriages it impacts both our mood in the short term but also really begins to erode our marital satisfaction over the long term.
This is critical because negativity doesn’t have to be a huge blatant thing. It can just be subtle or minor or more about a bit of an attitude. It’s like cholesterol that just builds up over time. It’s not as momentous as a broken leg but after a while you find yourself in a crisis.
A How-To You may have realized you have some negative habits in your marriage and aren’t sure what to do with them. To talk about them with your spouse seems negative, but you don’t want to live with them anymore. What to do? Listen to the bonus audio clip that deals specifically with how to give helpful feedback to your spouse.I Want It! Expressing Gratitude and Appreciation Will Strengthen your Marriage Stop and think for a moment. When was the last time you pointed our directly to your spouse, without any sarcasm or joking, but sincerely expressed something to him or her that you appreciated?
We all want more of this, right? You’re maybe hoping that your spouse would give you more. I get that! But, how much are you GIVING? You can only change yourself directly.
We’ve noticed in our marriage that this gratitude and appreciation thing is a cycle – the more you give the more you get. We go in and out of this cycle all the time, but we’re trying to be more in than out. We’re looking for those moments when we can say, “I really appreciate how you handled our daughter in that difficult situation” or “Thanks for doing my laundry – again!”
One of the classic cycles we get into as couples is the demand/withdraw cycle. Probably 80% of the time (or more) it is the wife demanding and the husband withdrawing. It looks like an attacking wife and a husband distancing himself. Because the demand/withdraw cycle usually has a negative effect, a study from last year looked at how gratitude impacted these demand/withdraw patterns. They found that expressing gratitude to your spouse is a practical process that both promotes and protects the quality of your marriage.[ii]
What is really neat about that is that anyone can do gratitude and it will have a positive impact on your marriage.
To take this further, a study from 2012 found that:
People who feel appreciated by their romantic partner report acting more appreciative towards their partner in return. (That’s the positive cycle happening)
This is Part 2 of the series on Body Image and Sexual Functioning. If you have not read the first part, do so here.
In the first half of this topic, we talked about the impact of social media, culture, and pornography on self-image and sexual self-consciousness. Today we talk about how you can help yourself and your spouse overcome issues with body image and thereby improve your sexual satisfaction.
Improving Body Image and Sexual Satisfaction Body Image & Sexuality Make sure you grab the worksheet to go with this topic because this is very serious stuff and the worksheet will help you distill your difficult thoughts and help you move yourself towards a place of healing and greater intimacy.Get It Now
In addition to the worksheet there are three things to think about today. First, recognize the buffering effect of marriage. The very fact that you are married needs to be recognized. In 2004, researchers studied what they call the “cultural standard of an impossible-to-attain ideal body image”.[i]
They compared married couples and single individuals and found that marriage lessens the importance of the ideal body image for both men and women. In this study, married people, when compared to single people, rated it less important for their spouses to possess the ideal body image.
The importance of long-lasting, satisfying relationships decreases the importance of body dissatisfaction and mitigates the impact of unrealistic ideal body image.
This should be not underestimated as popular media and the marketing world would pitch the ideal sexual partner as young, single, attractive, fit, a model or movie star. The actual human brain, on the other hand, which you have and your spouse has is actually wired to appreciate a healthy intimate relationship over ideal body image. Your brain is real – Hollywood is not, and porn is not.
Trust this God-given reality that when we get married God makes two people one flesh. There is a sacred union and he designed that union and us as people so that as we age together and make babies and bodies’ grow old and mature, the intimacy actually can improve while the physical appearance is going the other direction. Secondly, sexual function is related to body image, not body weight. Again, this is a very important point. In 2013, a study that looked at the effect of body image and body mass index on the sexual functioning of women found that:[ii]
The positive body image of women had a positive effect on their sexual function. Women who were overweight and obese based on BMI had poorer body image, but the weight had no effect on a woman’s sexual function.
How you see yourself is more important than what you look like.
Speaking on behalf of men, Caleb points out two things at play here. One is that husbands appreciate their wife’s self-care, but the second is that they don’t need their wife to have the perfect body. It is valuable to bring the best version of ourselves (both husband and wife) to the marriage, but what is most important is the connection and love that we have.
In the context of sexual intimacy, what a husband wants is for his wife not to be able to get enough of him. To quote Caleb, “You, coming at me hungrily, is more important by FAR than you coming at me with a perfect body. It’s not even on the same scale, in fact. I just want to be wanted.”
Other Christian bloggers and podcasters are saying the same thing – you don’t need to buy into the unrealistic standards that are out there. Thirdly, husbands – you play a critical role in your wife’s ability to move forward. Caleb and I know a guy who would point out a woman on the street and say to his wife, “Why can’t you look like that?” Let me add, his wife was taking pretty good care of herself at the time too.
Ladies – if this is your husband, this is HIS problem, not yours. I know it’s yours in that you feel the pain, but this is about his own issues. It is NOT about you.
Another study of 144 couples found that wives’ s...
Body image and sex…. a super sensitive topic for a lot of people. We’ll try to be gentle, but we’ll also be challenging you to do some serious thinking about your self-image and the expectations you’re bringing to your sexual intimacy.
This is a really stressful topic, and guys walk on eggshells around it. Caleb likens the topic of sex and body image to a mousetrap. There is a lot of high-strung energy there, and if you don’t touch it everything is ok. But if you DO happen to touch it, it snaps and releases every bit of energy at once. No wonder men get nervous about the topic! The Problem of Sexual Self-Consciousness There is a wide range of research that supports the fact that holding a poor body image impacts my own sexual functioning negatively. There are a number of theories out there as to why this happens, but one of the more prominent theories is the issue of sexual self-consciousness.[i]
Sexual self-consciousness is when your mind and thoughts are overly preoccupied with your body in a sexual context. When this happens, you direct your attention towards your appearance and away from the sexual pleasure which takes you far away from enjoying the moment, or the sense of togetherness and connection. Thoughts such as “Am I jiggling while we’re doing this? Does he think I’m too fat? He seems disinterested - Is that why he always has his eyes closed? We can only have sex with the lights off” show that you’re more focused on what you look like instead of being present with your spouse.
Here is what the researchers found when looking at the issues of sexual self-consciousness:[ii]
Women are significantly more likely to report appearance concerns than men. No surprise there. But here’s something to note: appearance concerns were positively related to sexual problems for both men and women. So the concern is there for more women than men, but if the concern is there, it doesn’t matter what gender you are. The relationship between body shame and sexual pleasure and problems was mediated by sexual self-consciousness during physical intimacy. Men and women’s body shame was related to greater sexual self-consciousness, which in turn predicted lower sexual pleasure and sexual arousability. That just means that there is a chain of thought from shame to self-consciousness to reduced pleasure and arousability. Sexual self-consciousness affected men and women’s sexual arousability and pleasure to the same extent, but women’s body shame was a stronger predictor of sexual self-consciousness, so a higher vulnerability to body shame was there.
So, it seems that body shame in a sexual context affects both men and women in the same manner, but women are more susceptible to being triggered into feeling sexually self-conscious which leads us to the question, why do women have such high levels of body shame? The Social Context of Body Shame and Poor Self-Image Body shame literally means feeling ashamed of your body and physical appearance. This comes from our culture’s emphasis on women’s beauty and physical appearance which leads to self-objectification.
Self-objectification is the tendency to regard one’s physical self primarily in terms of appearance and to adopt an outsider’s perspective on the physical self.[iii]
We can define our physical self in terms of health, self-care, comfort in our own skin, etc, but it’s difficult. My physical self does have an appearance, and all the marketing is about appearance. It is easy to buy into this idea that my physical self is entirely defined by my appearance rather than the healthier notion of asking myself if I feel comfortable in my own skin.
Our culture teaches women that their sexual partners are mostly concerned about their physical attractiveness. Even in the context of a marriage with Christian values, wives carry this same belief that their husband is primarily concerned about her physical attractiveness. This heightens this sense that physical appearance is of primary imp...
So, we all know the old saying, “You can’t change your spouse, you can only change yourself”. Well, apparently that saying isn’t 100% true. You can actually leverage your self-care to feel better about yourself and consequently, improve the well being of your marriage.
Self-care is integral to the health of our marriages. There are not a lot of studies to 100% prove the link between self-care and marriage where, for example, they study exercise and measure marital outcomes, but we want to look at the overall idea of taking good care of ourselves by eating well, exercising, sleeping and making leisure time because this does become a marital issue.
You see, when we fail to take care of ourselves, our mood, stress levels, and emotional responses all suffer. This, in turn, has a detrimental effect on the people around us.
Think about how this works. Husband is stressed so doesn’t sleep well. This causes the wife not to sleep well. As husband gets tired, he becomes more quiet and withdrawn; as wife gets tired, she gets grumpy. Soon there is an attacker-withdrawer cycle going on. (Don’t ask me how I know this.)
The research, as well as real-life, shows us that emotions, hormones, moods and stress levels of a couple are intimately tied together. This comes into play through a phenomenon in marriage that is known as coregulation.
Take Care of Yourself Work through the key areas of self care with this self-guided worksheet. Available to our patrons (become a patron today to receive immediate access).I Want It! Coregulation in Marriage Coregulation is the dynamic, reciprocal interchange between partners across multiple biological systems.[i] That just means that we influence each other’s emotions and well-being.
This is an important dynamic at play in our marriages and it is happening automatically all the time. You don’t even think about it! It goes in both directions so that spouses can pull each other up or pull each other down.
The good part of this is that it helps us stay in sync and hopefully reach out to each other and lift each other up. Coregulation Ties Spouse’s Emotions Together A study in 2008, looked at how couples affected each other after spending time apart pursuing their own activities. They found that if a couple scored high on interpersonal insecurity (ie. They felt insecure about their relationship) then if one spouse reunited with negatives emotions the other spouse got on board with those negative emotions right away. On the other hand, if the husband was the type of guy who was willing to see his wife’s perspective and they came back together with softer negative emotions (like sadness or gloominess) then they would also match emotions.
There are other variables at play, but the point is that any couple’s emotions are interconnected pretty quickly when they reunite after pursuing individual activities.[ii]
For example, if the husband gets home and the wife is angry, he’s likely to get on board with that. If she is sad, he’ll join her in her sadness.
We don’t want to oversimplify because there are other variables at play, but the point is that generally, we do have this emotional pull on each other. We are – to some degree- tied at the hip when it comes to emotions. Coregulation Ties Spouse’s Hormones and Moods Together It’s funny what studies researchers think up sometimes… Saxbe and Repetti took saliva samples to measure cortisol levels in 30 married couples, multiple times a day over three days. “How’s your marriage? Just spit in this little cup right here.”
They found that a couple’s cortisol levels (cortisol is the 'stress' hormone) moved together. They also found that couples’ mood moved together.[iii]
The same thing was found when another study looked specifically at stress levels and compared the genders. It was found that wives had a greater impact on husbands than husbands did on wives. It actually was noted that high-stress levels on the wife’s part had a pretty significant impact on th...
Respect. We all want it, and we don’t want any exceptions - but we all know how easy we can turn it off and get our ugly on when things aren’t going our way!
Respect is on the decline, generally, in our culture, but one of the most important places we can show respect is in our marriages – both as husbands and wives. It’s not something that is talked about very often; so today we will look at the specific dangers of contempt (lack of respect) and how you can move your marriage towards greater respect.
A book that was helpful to us early on in our marriage was Love & Respect by the Eggerichs'. This book taught us how to safely say, “I’m feeling disrespected right now.” It gave us a healthy way to express our feelings and helped us realize when we were being inconsiderate of our spouse.
Sadly, respect isn’t a consistent presence in every marriage, and contempt abounds. There are actually a lot of words that we thought of that could mean the opposite of respect, but they basically all fall under the umbrella of contempt, so that’s the word we’ll be using today. The Problem of Contempt Contempt is a problem because it is destructive in marital conflict and is also an early predictor of divorce. It is more than criticism. It adds this mean element where the intent is to insult and psychologically abuse your spouse. Contempt can look like insults, name-calling, hostile humour, mockery, and sneering.[i]
You may ask the question, as Gottman did if all negative emotions are equally corrosive in marriage? We all have moments as a spouse that we’re not proud of, and we don’t like ourselves when we act that way but are these moments of anger (excluding all abusive behaviour) as bad as contempt?
Gottman and his fellow researchers found that contempt, belligerence, and defensiveness were prime suspects in causing marital instability. Anger wasn’t nearly as damaging to the marriage as these three things. In other words, as it relates to our topic today, contempt in the middle of marital conflict is a very strong pointer leading towards divorce.[ii]
There is a positive side to this research though; there are ways to show the respect that can neutralize those moments when our spouse does something unattractive. In the study, the couples that handled conflict well behaved in a way that was gentle and soothing and worked towards de-escalating (calming down negativity). The real challenge here is being strong enough to decide that you’re not going along with your spouse’s negativity and not getting on board with their contempt.
10 Ways To Show Respect Download this quick self-evaluation to review where YOU are at in terms of showing respect. As a bonus, we give you 10 ways that you can practice showing respect in your day to day interactions. I Want It! What Does Respect Look Like? It can be challenging to define respect. It is not an emotion. It’s not just a behaviour. It’s hard to define, but we certainly know when we are getting it or when we are not. Really, respect is an attitude accompanied by emotions, thoughts and behaviour.[iii] It has a sense of equality (people who see themselves as equals show respect to each other), and as part of that, there is also mutuality (give and take: both are into it). Caring and supportiveness are also involved.
This alludes to one of the reasons why respect is so important in a marriage – and in all of our important relationships; it has to be going both ways in order to feel right. If you’re more powerful than someone else and they show you respect, that’s really just servitude. They feel like a servant. Marriage is more than that though – we don’t just want respect; we want to be able to respect our spouse. It has to be mutual.
The best way to do a quick check on the level of respect in your marriage is by the following six questions that are used in a tool called MIDSS (Measurement Instrument Database for Social Sciences, developed by Hendreick and Hendrick)[iv] and also used in the bonus ...
It’s easy to feel entitled to certain rights and benefits from our marriages. That entitlement always seems to be there but is never helpful in creating a great marriage. Take hope though, there is a better way - it's called sacrifice.
Gary Thomas’ book “Sacred Marriage” speaks to this when he asks the question, 'What if marriage was more about making you holy than making you happy'? He confronts the idea that we think marriage should make us all goo-goo ga-ga happy but instead we run smack into our own humanity, and our own sin.
The beauty of marriage is that is in an opportunity to have these ugly things brought to light and then work on putting them out of our lives and thereby experiencing transformation through the power of the Holy Spirit in our marriage.
So let’s take a look at entitlement and how this can damage our marriage, then, how to, instead, move towards giving sacrificially to one another. Our premise is, that at the end of the day, giving sacrificially benefits both myself and my spouse and also my marriage as a whole.
A Sacrificial Marriage Download our convicting, searching worksheet that will help you take your sacrificial love to the next level.I Want It! The Problem of Entitlement in Marriage Very simply, entitlement is about what I think I deserve from others. It’s about my expectations.
In a marriage, entitlement really stinks because marriage is supposed to be about an entity called “us” and yet entitlement is about the entity called “me”. Yet, the irony of it is, in marriage the intensity of entitlement feelings is unique and amplified compared to other relationships.
Tolmacz looked at this and noted that couple relationships have two very specific dynamics that make them prone to unique issues around entitlement:
Couple relationships have a high level of intimacy Couple relationships generate wants, needs, and expectations.
He found evidence from clinical settings and practice shows that entitlement influences the quality of our marriages, and the level of satisfaction we each experience in our marriages.[i]
Caleb has found the same thing – when helping distressed marriages heal and recover, there is always some unhealthy entitlement in the mix that has caused the distress.
What is particularly interesting about this study from Tolmacz is that he found that gender is a huge factor in the issue of relational entitlement and that women are especially affected. This relates to the identity roles we bring to our marriages as men and women where women are socialized to be concerned about meeting the needs of others. This is a great trait but leads to the depreciation of their own wishes, needs, and self-worth and consequently, they are more prone to being on the receiving end of the entitlement problem.
This gets more serious though as this same researcher found that entitlement contributes to desire for a divorce, and does more so among men and women in making the divorce decision. Generally speaking, is entitlement was a weapon, men are holding it, and women are on the receiving end of its brutality.
It gets even more severe too. There are numerous studies linking entitlement with violence in intimate partner relationships. Abusive men use a sense of entitlement to give an excuse for their violence towards women. Not only that but men who feel entitled to their wife’s body act more violently than other men.
So, realize, that while we experience and express entitlement at some pretty basic and relatively innocent levels, it also has this really dark, dark side to it. For that reason, even if you are not anywhere near that severe end of the spectrum, we’re asking you to take it very seriously. Husbands, this is a challenge primarily for you - Make sure you get the worksheet.
For the part of our audience that shares our Christian faith – let’s look at Ephesians 5 for a moment. This is a chapter which abusive men who like to use the Bible like a stick – which is not how it was ever i...
This is a big question.
Are you lonely in your marriage?
That is not a fun place to be, but there is good news – growing your intimacy can expel loneliness from your marriage and stop it from creeping back in.
There is a bit of a chain reaction when it comes to loneliness in marriage. It’s clear from the research that we’ll look at in a bit that loneliness can arise from a lack of intimacy. Loneliness and intimacy are affected in turn by the quality of communication and emotion skills in the marriage. If we can build up these two skill sets, then your marriage will see more intimacy. If there is more intimacy, obviously we’re going to help stave off those feelings of loneliness.
Take It Up a Notch If, at this point, you’re sucking in a deep breath and saying to yourself, “I have no idea how to bring emotional skills to my marriage”, then we have more good news for you. Caleb has recorded a special recording just for our patrons. Become a patron today to receive instant access.Bring It! The Problem of Loneliness in Marriage Loneliness is not as uncommon as you might think. Ironically, if you’re out there feeling lonely, you have company! Caleb and I have even had times of this in our own relationship despite having a marriage that we enjoy very much.
Research reveals that individuals in intimate relationships often feel lonely because the level of intimacy in the relationship is not meeting their desires or expectations.[i] That is why we’ll look at intimacy as well as loneliness in this post.
So, how many people are experiencing loneliness in their marriage?
A study from 2009 found that between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5 experienced moderate to strong emotional or social loneliness.[ii] That’s sad. That is a high number. Given that loneliness appears to affect the quality of our intimate relationships,[iii] we have a vicious cycle going on. Loneliness affects relationship quality which makes us lonely which affects our relationship quality which makes us lonely... What Causes Loneliness in Marriage? Many factors can contribute to loneliness in marriage, but two major ones we look at today are communication and emotional skillfulness. A lack of these two things will significantly contribute to loneliness.
Researchers, in 2009, looked at married couples and compared the extent of their loneliness to the functioning and quality of their marriages. They found that stronger emotional and social loneliness was found in those who did not receive emotional support from a spouse and who did not have frequent conversations with their spouse.[iv]
A second article found that married folk who were lonely displayed fewer positive behaviours than non-lonely individuals. Lonely marriages displayed:
Fewer positive attempts to make interactions pleasant Less openness, including fewer direct conversations, less advice, and less listening to one another. Fewer assurances Fewer social networks and relied less on friends and family Fewer shared tasks such as performing routine chores together.
All this research just shows why it is particularly helpful to focus in on these two areas of communication and emotion skills. And more good news – learning skills is something that anyone can do. It’s something you can add to your marriage and something new that you can bring to your relationship to strengthen it and help move yourselves away from loneliness and toward intimacy.
Let’s talk about building intimacy first by learning emotion skills and second by learning communication skills. Building Intimacy Through Emotion Skills A group of three researchers wanted to specifically test the theory that emotional skillfulness affects the intimacy process in relationships. In other words, they wanted to see how being good at handling emotions impacted marital satisfaction. They found that:
There was a link between the ability to identify/communicate emotions and marital adjustment. (Marital adjustment in this context means how well the spo...
It’s not rocket science to know that rejecting your spouse is a really, really painful thing to do. But, think about the opposite for a moment: if I asked you to sit down and list the things you do regularly to communicate your unconditional acceptance of your spouse: how long would that list be?
First though, let’s start with the opposite of acceptance-rejection. I think it is clear to everyone that it hurts to be rejected, but it is worth knowing how severe that impact is in marriage.
A study from 2013 looked at the psychological adjustment of individuals who had grown up experiencing rejection from their parent and they were rejected by their spouse. As a side note here; this is something we should be aware of. We tend to choose a spouse who will continue to treat us the same way our parents did: either for good or bad or more typically, for a mixture of those. We’re comfortable with the familiar and so unless we experience some personal growth between receiving caregiving from our parents and entering into marriage, we tend to perpetuate generational problems. These researchers found that:[i]
72% of men and 68% of women who received acceptance from both their parents and their intimate partner were psychologically healthy and adjusted. On the other hand, 71% of men and 60% of women who experienced rejection from both their parents and their intimate partner showed serious psychological maladjustment. (Psychological maladjustment meaning that they showed high levels of hostility and aggression, overdependence, negative self-esteem, and self-adequacy, were emotionally unresponsive, emotionally unstable, and had a negative worldview).
We don’t tell you this to make you feel messed up – just to point out that rejection is a very severe experience with very real, very detrimental impact.
The scary thing is, we do this to each other all the time in marriage. Every time your spouse makes a bid to connect with you and you decline – that’s rejection. It might be tiny, it might be big. Everything from declining a bid or proposition for sex that night to ending a hug a little early to an invitation to converse that just elicits a grunt.
We think of rejection as a spouse with a suitcase leaving a note behind on the bed – that’s the most severe, dramatic type, but what about those times when your spouse is trying to talk to you and you’re like “…Huh? Hang on, I’m on my phone.” A thousand minute rejection like this compound to the severity of the one major walk-out kind of abandonment.
It is really important to stop and consider the way we think about rejection because most of us intend to be (or want to be) loving, kind, engaged spouses. But… we also drop the ball a lot and may not fully grasp the cumulative severity of this.
Let’s look at the positive side now and talk about acceptance. The Important of Acceptance The first thing to look at is unconditional regard which is one form of acceptance. Unconditional regard is the basic acceptance and support of a person regardless of what they say or do.
In Christian language, this is brotherly love coupled with the effort of separating the sinner from the sin. (Carl Rogers originally birthed the idea of unconditional positive regard – not sure if he’d agree with Caleb’s Christianized definition, but it works for us!)
A study looked at college students in romantic relationships – I’m presuming most were unmarried but I think the principles apple to marriage. Here’s what he found[ii]:
Negative conflict acts as a mediator between unconditional regard and relationship satisfaction by the effect is has on unconditional regard Negative conflict may lower the extent to which an individual feels accepted or understood by hi or her partner which then has an influence on relationship satisfaction.
In plain English… Fighting in marriage makes you feel less accepted and less understood, which decreases your satisfaction with the marriage.
There are some things you can do without in marriage – and still have a pretty good marriage. Commitment is NOT one of those things. It is foundational. If you don’t have it, your marriage is toast. But, the good news is, even if you don’t have it right now, you can choose to be committed today and start building this essential piece into your marriage.
There is a lot of content out there about marriage. A lot of people are talking about a diversity of things in the world of marriage. Some of it is helpful. But I want you to think of commitment like one of the crown jewels. You need to protect it, preserve it, and give it special attention. Commitment is one of the core areas at the heart of a healthy, lasting, thriving marriage. What is Marital Commitment? Think of words like loyalty, faithfulness, dedication, maybe even focus or integrity.
In the research, there are a variety of definitions that range from vague (“having a long term orientation toward the relationships”[i]) to specific (personal: wanting to stay married, moral: feeling morally obligated to stay married, and structural: feeling constrained to stay married[ii]).
Perhaps you are a little cynical about commitment due to your circumstances or history or even the experience of your parent’s marriage and think it is overrated. You prefer your freedom to being tied to another person.
Ironically, a study in 2002 showed that couples with higher levels of commitment felt less trapped and were more satisfied with their relationships. Higher commitment creates more freedom and more satisfaction.
We have jokes and comments in our society about the “ball and chain” of marriage and how a man is trapped once he’s been to the altar, but this is not the reality. The experience of highly-committed couples is one of greater satisfaction and even a greater sense of freedom because they have that secure base in their marriage.
So the question to ask your self is how committed are you, right now, to your spouse? The Consequences of Abandonment The opposite of commitment could be abandonment. This often happens through divorce or infidelity. How Divorce Affects Spouses and Children Divorce, in particular, is especially devastating. We have a textbook in our office written for marriage therapists that states emphatically that we just need to get over divorce being a big deal and we need to just accept it as a normal transition in our culture. That is total garbage! The reality is that divorce is devastating.
Here’s what the research says about divorce:
Divorced individuals are unhappier, have more psychological distress and have poorer self-concepts. Divorced individuals have more problems with their health and greater mortality risk. Divorce can lead to greater levels of depression and alcohol use. Children of divorced families struggle in school, have more conduct issues, struggle in social situations, and have lower self-concepts.[iii]
There is also a generational impact from abandonment and low marital commitment. Another study by the same researcher found that marital instability is transmitted across generations because children see the weak commitment of their parents, which becomes the norm to them. So, when they consider their own marriages this is their native paradigm.
In their study, they found that children who had divorced parents had double the likelihood of their own marriage ending in divorce. In looking at this, the reason given for this elevated risk of divorce was because they “hold a comparatively weak commitment to the norm of life long marriage.”[iv]
Serious stuff. How Infidelity Affects Commitment The obvious point from the research on this one is that infidelity is a leading cause for divorce, and only a small portion of couples who go through infidelity are able to improve their relationship afterwards. [v]
The consequences of infidelity are a loss of trust, decreased personal and sexual confidence,
This is the second part of a topic that’s pretty common and can be pretty difficult for a lot of couples. It’s really just the idea that the wife is running the marriage and family and the husband is the breadwinner but not really engaged or involved as much as they would like him to be. We’re assuming you want to change that.
Last week we looked at the wife’s role in this scenario. Today we are challenging the men. Before you get defensive, husband, know that we realize what a horrible place it is to feel disempowered or marginalized or even kind of useless. If you want to lead, to be involved and engaged, then this is for you, even though it may be tough to hear. Does Your Involvement As A Husband Matter? Yes.
That’s the short answer. Yes.
Even if your wife wants to do everything and run the family and the marriage, the research says this is not beneficial to her or to the family. Your involvement will help both your wife and your family to function better. Housework Let’s look at housework for a moment: when husbands are involved in housework, their wives have less psychological stress, feel more satisfied with their marriages and are overall happier.[i]
These results were found in a study that compared the well-being of wives whose husbands were highly involved in housework with wives whose husbands were minimally involved in housework. It found that “wives whose husbands were minimally involved were 1.60 times more likely to be distressed, 2.96 times more likely to be uncomfortable with their husbands, and 2.69 times more likely to be unhappy.[ii] Parenting An article compiling the research from hundreds of articles looked for the benefits of father involvement. Here are a few things they found:[iii]
Academic Benefits: School-aged children of involved fathers are better academic achievers. They are more likely to get A’s, have higher grade point averages, get better achievement test scores, receive superior grades, perform a year above their expected age level of academic tests, obtain higher scores on reading achievement, or learn more and perform better in school. Emotional Benefits and General Wellbeing: When fathers are involved, their children are less depressed, have fewer conduct problems, less emotional distress and negative emotions such as fear and guilt. Social wellbeing: Children with involved father have more positive friendships with less aggression and conflict and more generosity. Parenting Relationship: There is a positive correlation between marital quality and levels of father involvement in childcare, the quality of the father-child relationship, the father’s satisfaction with his role as a parent, and the father’s competence as a parent.
I’m sure we could keep going on this idea that involved fathers and husbands makes for a better family and marriage. So we would encourage you, even if your wife has explicitly communicated she doesn’t want you involved, to challenge her on it. Maybe you’ve only assumed her desire from some non-verbal communication or misinterpreted some Womanspeak.
It’s going to be a difficult conversation but you can find some help with it in Episode 55: How to Disagree Without Sinking Your Love Boat.
The next question then, is how can a husband get more involved if his wife is taking control and pushing him out? How To Get Your Pants Back Before we actually get to the “how-to’s”, let’s look at some psychology.
There is an area of research called Identity Theory. Identity Theory says that individuals seek to verify their identity – the person they see themselves to be – by controlling the situations around them so that these situations match their desired identity.
For example, you may see this at work: a manager who sees himself as a problem solver actually kind of tweaks the experience of his direct reports so that they’re dependent on him and keep having to come to him to solve problems. It reinforces his identity and makes him feel better about himself.
Are you sick and tired of having to do everything? And your husband just doesn’t carry the load? And – on top of that – when you try to talk about it, you guys just end up fighting! No fun, hey?
Sometimes we even hear wives describe their husband as another one of the kids she has to take care of. That’s really sad. It is also understandable given that some husbands are completely disengaged in relation to domestic duties.
We learned this week though, that everything may not seem as it first appears…
What spawned this topic was a conversation Caleb had one day with a disengaged husband. After digging a bit, Caleb found out that when their first child arrived, his wife kind of parked him to one side and he felt that she said, “You don’t know what you’re doing, I’ll take it from here”. He bought into that and chose to go along with it.
So, we’re going to speak to both wives and husbands because we believe it takes two to tango. We’ll try to keep it fair. Wives, this post is for you, and husbands, your turn is coming next… We’re hoping that these articles will promote some useful conversations between you and your spouse so that you can restore a healthy balance, both feel engaged and involved and together as a couple and as parents, and both feel like you are contributing in your marriage. Why Is He Not Engaged? Here are some observations from a study in 2008 entitled “Withdrawal from Coparenting Interactions During Early Infancy”.[i] They found that if the husband is invested in the status quo and a child shows up he may well withdraw in order to avoid change. Additionally, they found that first-time mothers who were unhappy with the division of childcare labour escalated their demands (along with their stress!) resulting in more pronounced demand-withdrawal patterns in the marriage. This demand-withdraw pattern is a classic, common pattern. To sum it up, the more a wife demands, the more the husband pulls back (or the more a husband demands, the more the wife pulls back). What is ironic is that they both are acting in their respective ways to save the marriage. She wants to be close to him so pursues, he doesn’t want to get into an argument so withdraws, and the cycle keeps on going. The study also found that new fathers often feel excluded by the developing mother-infant bond. Some men respond by pressing their wives for more time, others channel their energies into the baby, while others progressively distance themselves from the mother-baby dyad. But what kind of men pulled back or withdrew?
Fathers who withdrew were less ego resilient (not open-minded or perceptive, not interested in understanding why others behave as they do and not open to viewpoints other than their own), and more likely to be in a marriage that was already showing distress signs before the baby arrived. These men also felt less respected as a parent by their wives which leads us to the subject of maternal gatekeeping. Maternal Gatekeeping Maternal gatekeeping is a phrase that refers to the beliefs and behaviour that a mom shows to discourage or restrict father involvement in childcare.[ii]
Given that research has shown that greater father involvement in children’s lives has been found to be associated with benefits for parents and children alike (more about this next week), this sense of maternal gatekeeping seems to be unhelpful.
Generally, the more domestic demands you place on a father and the more his ability to respond, the more he will contribute to childcare. Maternal gatekeeping undoes this because in an effort to maintain primacy (take first place) as mother, the wife ends up monitoring and restricting their husbands level and type of involvement in childcare.
This is more common among working-class employed mothers who are caught between gender role ideologies and the financial necessity of working full time. That’s a hard place to be – caught between this messaging about how you should be a stay at home mom and invest your heart...
If you’re living with another human being in this wonderful institution called marriage, then there is a good chance that at some point in your experience as a couple, your spouse is going to experience anxiety. I’ve seen this over and over and believe me, some couples handle it much better than others. Here are some how-to’s and how-not-to’s.
This topic was actually spawned by a conversation Caleb had some time ago with a frustrated husband. We’ll call him John. John’s wife was really struggling with anxiety and he was trying to fix it. (Trying to fix anxiety is about as effective as calming a puppy down by playing with it – and it’s a lot less fun!) He was bitter and frustrated and fed up.
He was still in love and still committed, just really struggling with it all, so Caleb asked him to do something. He asked John to reach way down inside himself and see if he could find compassion, then to act out of that place of compassion.
John decided to give it a try and their marriage turned a corner that day. There were still moments of anxiety and frustration, but when Caleb checked in with John sometime later, he and his wife were together. And not just together as in they stayed married, but they were together in the middle of her struggles. That’s a precious thing.
That true-life story is a bit of a spoiler for where we’re going here, but this is where we need to start. If your spouse experiences anxiety, you cannot reason it out. You cannot talk him or her off that ledge through reason, persuasion, manipulation, threats, or anything like that. The battle with anxiety is never won as long as you think you’re in a battle.
The biggest blessing you can give a spouse who struggles with anxiety is the gift of compassion. This will help you yourself also as it is way easier to be compassionate towards an anxious person than it is to fight their anxiety.
Fighting anxiety never works. Only compassion will effectively uproot anxiety.
But let me give you an example of what compassion is not. I was observing a couple (let’s call them Bob and Betty) at a ferry terminal one time. They were obviously dating. She had just missed a ferry, and the next boat wouldn’t leave for another two hours. Because of this, she would miss her night shift at the hospital. At this point, Betty was becoming quite distressed about the situation, and dear Bob was trying to help. Unfortunately, he had missed the “com” part of compassion and was just trying to use passion to ease the situation.
For every statement Betty would make, Bob would just respond, “I love you Betty” and try to hug and kiss her. Well, I’m sorry, Bob, but that was not helping! Betty was becoming more and more frantic, pushing Bob away and trying to avoid him. Obviously, Bob loved Betty, but it didn’t look to her (or me!) that he cared about what she was going through in the moment.
Compassion means that you acknowledge and understand what the anxious person is going through. It does not mean that you ignore their feelings. Can you imagine? “I missed the ferry, what am I going to do?” “I love you, Betty” Kiss kiss “Oh good, I was worried about your love when the ferry left without me... Now I can’t get to work. I need this shift so bad so that I can make the car payment this month.” “It’s ok. I love you, Betty” “Phew, I’m glad your love will make me enough money to pay the bank… What am I going to do?” “I love you, Betty. Let’s make out.” “Ok, obviously your love solves every dilemma. Let’s get married" - NOT! There is a difference between supporting your spouse with compassion and ignoring your spouse’s needs while showing passion. You need to love. You need to provide a safe, committed, secure relationship. That safe place is going to be the anchor that your spouse needs to get through this hard time. What is Anxiety? Some anxiety is very brief and situational – like the feeling right before a major job interview. It can also be more prolonged and diffuse as in the case of gen...
Perhaps you’ve never gone through an affair in your marriage. Or perhaps you have. Have you ever felt the gut wrenching kick to your heart, or spent sleepless nights wondering where he is or what he’s doing? Or maybe you’re completely numb and not feeling anything anymore…
There is nothing quite like the pain of betrayal.
But life doesn’t end there.
Even if it feels like it should.
So how do you move on?
Slowly and carefully and painfully and deeply. I would really recommend that if something this major happens to your marriage that you seek professional help from a therapist. But, I also know that life happens and sometimes therapy is not an option, so here are some ideas that I pray will give you some help and hope. I hope this will help even if you’ve never experienced the bombshell of discovering an affair because at some level we have all experienced some kind of betrayal in our relationship – even just at the level of our spouse letting us down on some issue that is not at all adulterous. So translate the word ‘betrayal’ for ‘affair’ if that suits your situation better. Also, translate ‘him’ for ‘her’ (or ‘wife’ for ‘husband’) if that reflects your world too because I know that it’s not only men that betray - I’m female, so I’ll be writing from my gender’s point of view. If you’ve been betrayed by an affair, it is your choice what you want to do with your marriage. Your husband has broken his marriage vows. For now, I’m going to assume that you both want to recover your marriage and create a stronger, better future relationship.
And have hope, because often the “post-affair” marriage is sweeter and stronger and closer than the marriage ever was before!
If this is you – you’ve been hurt so severely, but want to recover your marriage – there are three stages that you’ll need to go through.[i] Stage 1: The Emotional Impact of the Affair The emotional impact of an affair is absolutely devastating. Give yourself permission to feel the feelings that come up. Don’t try to stuff them or cover them up. You have every right to feel what you’re feeling. Try to identify what you’re feeling and even where you’re feeling it so you can communicate what you feel to your spouse. Again, get professional help if you can, to help you work through the impact of your situation.
Another factor at this stage – more practical than emotional, is if you both want to work through what has happened in your marriage, then the affair relationship must stop!
Husband – this may mean grieving the loss of that relationship (but don’t expect much empathy here…) and then taking steps to ensure it does NOT start again. Let your extramarital partner know that you are committed to working on your marriage and to do that you must END the relationship and have no further contact.
But back to feelings.
As a couple, one of the first things you’ll be dealing with is the overwhelming feelings generated by the affair. They’re going to be intense. There’s going to be anger and betrayal and shock and hopelessness. It’s going to feel like a black hole that you can’t get out of.
Try to express these feelings to your husband. Let him know how his actions made you feel. He caused it, he deserves to know about it. Now, this is not the time to have a screaming rant at your husband. It’s a lot easier for him to embrace a wounded woman who has been hurt beyond imagination than a woman attacking him. You need to express these feelings in a way he can accept them, and then he needs to acknowledge and validate them.
Husband – this is NOT the time to be defensive or to minimize. Hear how your wife really feels and support her in those feelings.
These discussions need to be limited to finite periods of time that you purposefully set aside – a continual hashing and rehashing is not useful. Take specific times to sit down and discuss these feelings; first the wife, then the husband. This will help you both to clarify and understand each other more.
It is a well-researched fact that having a baby usually has a negative impact on your marital satisfaction. Let’s look at the whole early parenting thing and draw out some important lessons for married couples who are parents or about to become parents.
As you transition into parenthood, you’ll want to have some pretty specific parenting and marriages strategies to make sure that mom, babe, and dad are all taken care of because babies make for busy lives! They take a lot of time.
But there is some good news here. Studies show that as demands on our time have increased over the past 40 years, generally speaking, most couples have decreased their involvement in paid employment so that they can keep up with time spent with their spouse and children.[i]
We think this is great! That shows good values are at work. It also speaks to those of you considering having children that this is something you’ll be challenged with as well so be prepared for that. Most couples are adding time into their weekdays by reducing the number of hours they work.
Weekends are a little different story. Most couples end up paying a social and personal cost for maintaining their levels of spousal time. If you’re married with kids you’re probably spending less time with friends and extended family on weekends. Again, this is reasonable.
It is so great to see that in contemporary marriages spousal companionship is important and people are prioritizing it. However, we would urge you not to become too isolated from your social networks. There needs to be a balance.
So, that’s parenting and marriage in terms of time management. Some ideas there for you if you need a change.
Now in terms of your marriage itself and how you’re relating to each other - you need to stay connected as a couple. As we’ve already established in other episodes, having kids does put a dent in your marital satisfaction, so this is something we all need to work at.
A study by some major marriage researchers looked at couples' marital friendship at the start of their marriage versus the decline over the transition to parenthood.[ii] They followed these newlywed couples for 6 years and compared the new parents to a control group who remained childless over that time.
Here is what helped mothers to have stable or increasing marital satisfaction:
The husband’s expression of fondness toward her. The more warmth he puts in, the more satisfied she feels. The husband’s high awareness for her and their relationship. This really ties to the first one. If he is more aware of the stress she is experiencing and responds with more fondness: this is a huge help. It goes the other way too - if she is aware of his efforts to be supportive and loving, she is way more satisfied in her marriage. Her awareness for her husband and their relationship. Not only can husbands help by being aware and acting out of that in a generous way but she also needs to be alert enough to acknowledge, receive and even reciprocate this.
What about the other side? What predicts a decline in marital satisfaction of mothers?
The husband’s negativity towards her wife. Corrosive. The husband’s disappointment in the marriage. Also corrosive. The husband or wife describing their lives as chaotic. Chaos as a feeling comes from the sense that there are changes in their lives that are out of control. This adds a lot of stress to a major life transition.
So, how does this transition work then? In 2006, some researchers looked at the quality of the intimate relationship six months after delivery.[iii] They uncovered four factors that were influential.
The first relates to this whole subject of transition to parenting. It’s the most mentioned category in the study. The factors here that were most frequently mentioned were the “loyal sharing of responsibility” and “mutual respect and regard”.
What is happening in these marriages that are transitioning successfully is that the dad and mom are putting aside their...
We had this idea that we were trying to figure out. If you get really fanatical about church and ministry, does that form a point for your marriage to rally around? Or does that investment come at the expense of your marriage?
This is, in part, prompted by the observation that a lot of highly involved spiritual leaders end up with failed marriages. We don’t want to get into the whole issue of fallen pastors and spiritual leaders and the psychology behind that, although that is a very interesting – and tragic – topic, but today want to bring this into our lives.
All of us are vulnerable to going crazy about the church or some ministry or even a hobby together. As we build the meaning of our relationship around the intensity of our activity and involvement in spiritual works, we have to ask the question: Is this a good thing?
This is where it gets tricky! How could you say, “No, it’s not good to be that involved at church or in Missions work or whatever”? It seems sacrilegious. On the other hand, we do know that when we get very, very busy our marriage doesn’t feel better, it feels worse. So we need to look at what is going on and what the right balance is for us so that we can, as a couple, engage in ministry that is meaningful but do so without sacrificing our marriage.
Remember the Biblical principle found in the instructions of Samuel when he said, “To obey is better than sacrifice” (1 Samuel 15:22). This reminds us that it is better to obey the command as husbands to love our wives than it is to sacrifice our relationship with our wives.
It’s ironic how we can talk ourselves into something like it’s noble of us to sacrifice marriage and family in the name of God and for expanding his kingdom – but it is actually disobedience!
This is in no way a voice of criticism here for those who are seriously committed to serving God. Each marriage has a different tolerance for time apart vs together, the amount of activity vs together time, etc. It’s a unique balance for each couple, but the principle of obedience being better than sacrifice is one we all need to consider and reflect on.
Before we start looking into the research, let’s define a few terms.
Religiosity: a word to characterize the activity or busyness or works of faith.
Sacredness: a word meaning the process of assigning divine character or sacred significance to something. The “sacredness of marriage” is about the idea of Divine involvement/approval/blessing on the marriage. Here’s what the research shows. General religiosity has a very weak link with marital outcomes. In other words, being busy with ministry does not add to your marriage.
On the other hand, sacredness strongly predicts desirable marital outcomes. “Spouses who regard their unions as sacred and who sense God’s presence in their relationships tend to report more good feelings and fewer negative emotions towards their partners”.[i]
Spouses who value sacredness also generally use more collaborative problem solving and have less tendency towards aggression or stalemates in disputes. There are also more bonding experiences: everything from shared leisure, activities and conversation to a more rewarding sex life.
Fundamentally, sacredness also predicts the degree of commitment in the marriage.
We conclude from this study that the meaning we give to our marriage and the meaning that we ground our concept of togetherness on is more important than activities that we might base our marriage on. Sacredness trumps religiosity.
We’re not saying you shouldn’t go to church or be involved in serving God through various ministries. What we are seeing from the research is that there is no benefit to your marriage to place more value on these activities than on the sacredness of your marriage.
A second study from 2013 found very similar conclusions. After looking at 354 couples for a 3 year period, they found that the idea that religiosity is associated with stronger relationships is unfounded.[ii]
Do you ever NOT deal with something between you and your spouse, hoping it will just blow over or that it’s a passing issue? And perhaps life does sail smoothly for a while and then later, BOOM, it comes backs to bite you!?
Making it a principle in your marriage to talk about issues sooner rather than later will save you a lot of headaches.
For example, it is my nature to procrastinate (or avoid) dealing with issues and just hope they’ll blow over or go away. Unfortunately, it never seems to work that way, and instead, all these minor issues collect behind a temporary dam.
Whenever I react with WAY TOO MUCH emotion over something small (that’s the dam bursting), it’s a good indication to me that I haven’t been dealing with the issues as they arrive.
So, what I want to know is, WHY DO WE HOLD BACK? As usual, let's look at the research:
A study was done in 2004 which looked at decisions to withhold complaints in marriage. It points out that even in a satisfying relationship there are almost daily relational irritations. (We’re normal, Yay!) Even though the couple may uphold the principles of open and direct communication, the spouses frequently hold back on addressing the irritations. This study then looked at how these complaints related to power in the relationship.
It turns out that the person who complains the least holds the least power because they’re withholding in order to avoid negative consequences. A spouse who values his/her relationship is more likely to encourage the expression of complaints to their spouse.[i] Learning that blew my theories out the window. I always thought that it was the “strong one” who would let things go or suck-it-up. Turns out I was wrong… Another thing that affected whether a spouse would bring up irritations, was the type of relationship. In a relationship with more independent spouses, where they valued companionship and closeness but also valued keeping their independence, couples were most likely to express their irritations.
More traditional relationships that are invested in stability over spontaneity and hold traditional sex roles, tend to report a moderate proportion of unexpressed irritations. Finally, more individuated companionship type relationship that maintains psychological distance and values individual freedom report the high proportion of unexpressed irritations.
What we see here, is that the ore you build a relationship focussed on a strong emotional bond and respecting each other’s individuality, the more likely you are to bring things up. Or, in more psychobabblish language, the more differentiated the relationship, the more likely you are to deal with things sooner. We have a whole episode on differentiation, but the quick gist of it is the idea of being securely bonded yet individuated is a healthy posture for marriage.
A differentiated spouse knows their marriage is not at risk and can handle the anxiety of pointing out something about their spouse that has upset them.
Daily & Palomares (2004) also looked at couples avoiding topics. They found that the more individuals reported avoiding topics overall, the less satisfied they were with their romantically involved dating relationship. They also found a negative relationship between topic avoidance and satisfaction in families.
They conclude that people avoid topics because they are unsatisfied, and those that are satisfied are lead to discuss freely. BUT, they’re not sure about cause and effect. Does dissatisfaction lead to avoidance? Or avoidance to dissatisfaction?[ii]
We actually don’t know, but we DO know there is a correlation. Does Holding Back Work? We don’t think so, and neither do Daily & Palomares. The more you avoid current relationship concerns, the less satisfied you are relationally. It only makes sense that you can’t feel intimate if you can’t discuss everything.
The closeness between you is mediated by the range of topics you are free to discuss with each other.
Ouch, these were painful for me, as a wife, to find out. I don’t even want to think of the times I’ve done these things… AND didn’t even know if it was painful to Caleb.
You know, I went through the 3 Best Ways to Ruin Your Wife’s Day and totally understood EVERY ONE of them. I could relate, and fully understand how any one of them would ruin my day.
But, when it came to the things that ruined my husband’s day I actually got defensive and figured that the things weren’t actually that bad. That’s when it helps to have the research the back things up.
So without further ado: Number one: Insult his breadwinning ability. You know, complain about how he doesn’t make enough money for you to live on comfortably, and then go out with your girlfriends for some “retail therapy”. That will crush him really good!
Despite the advances of feminism and the increasing entry of women into the workplace over the last half century or more, the fact is that men still have this legacy belief in our culture that they carry the breadwinner role. Men’s roles have changed more slowly than women’s in that women have moved into the workplace but men haven’t moved into the family in the same way.
We are not here to give a commentary on feminism or traditional versus contemporary gender roles, but we do want to point out, dear wife, that your husband’s self-concept as a breadwinner is quite possibly a much more significant construct in his mind than you might think.
In a 2006 study, Dyke & Murphy looked at gender based definitions of success. They found that a woman’s success focused on a personal notion of balance and high importance was placed on relationships. For men, material success still loomed large; first was material success, then relationships, then making a contribution, and finally, having freedom.
Before we’re too hard on the wives – dear husband, are you sincerely a hard working man and not blowing all the dough on yourself or your truck or toys or whatever? 1 Timothy 5:8 says “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” If you are an able-bodied, able-minded man, you need to be providing for your family.
But back to the wives – if your hubby is doing his best, you need to build him up, not tear him down. The best way to ruin a hardworking man’s day is to insult him as a breadwinner when he gets home from work.
If your income is not where it needs to be, have that tough discussion. Ask yourselves the questions:
Are your expectations realistic, or do they need to be adjusted? Are you wanting or trying to live beyond your means? Is he on board for income growth, or in a dead-end job?
There may be a genuine need for more income. In that case, make a plan. Does he need more training or a different job, and what kind of income are you, the wife, bringing to the table? We have a whole series on budgeting if you need some help in that direction. Start with Episode 1, and go on from there.
So there it is; the number one way to ruin your husband’s day is to insult his breadwinning ability. Number two: Drown him with emotionality and then yell, “You just don’t understand me!” For most of you, wives, your husband doesn’t understand you completely, and that’s not entirely his fault nor yours. It is just how it is.
If you unload on him and then emphasize the fact that he doesn’t understand, he’ll probably spend part of the night and most of the next day trying to figure out what happened and what was actually going on. He’s going to do that because he loves you, but it’s probably not going to help.
When he buys you flowers he’s not just saying sorry, he’s also saying, “I have no idea what went on there, but I hope you’ll forgive me and we can move on”.
This is accentuated by another study done in 2006 by Gonzales & Koestener who looked at Valentine cards to see what the comments revealed about the romantic emotions of men...
Obviously, there will be quite a bit of satire in this post and we don’t actually want you to ruin your wife’s day, but the serious part is this: we want to highlight some key gender differences between guys and gals.
Perhaps some of you are like Caleb – you came to marriage having been raised in an all-boys family, and educated in an all-boys school while going to an all-boys church… only to discover that women have certain sensitivities that aren’t even on your male radar….
Before we start, we want you to know that we believe in the equality of women and men and that your wife is worthy of respect at all times and without exception. We also believe that teasing mixed with sarcastic truth is a form of verbal abuse. However, we both enjoy teasing each other and being teased. There is a healthy way to do that. So that’s our disclaimer, and without further ado, let’s get to the top three ways to ruin your wife’s day! Number One: Miss your lunch date with her. Later, have your secretary call, or text to apologize. A few researchers did a study of college women and men, asking what they wanted in a marriage partner. They were asking about qualities one would want in a spouse and looking for qualities where there were gender differences and where women, in particular, placed a higher emphasis.
One of those qualities was intelligence. Really, we can’t do much about our intelligence! The other two qualities are ones we want to emphasize: women desired a spouse who would be considerate and dependable. That’s why the best way to ruin your wife’s day is to completely let her down.
Women don’t need men (in our culture) for food, housing, and basic necessities – they can get these things on their own. What they do want is a man who is dependable as a husband for themselves and a father for their children.
So, if you want to ruin your wife’s day, just make sure you’re not dependable. Don’t keep your commitments. Don’t follow through with what you promise. Let her down.
The other thing women want is a husband who is considerate. That just means being careful not to cause inconvenience or hurt to others. This is about being very thoughtful of your spouse. It will delight your wife if you are a husband who is a considerate person – you are intentional about thinking about her, her needs, her concerns and how your actions and choices impact her.
Being inconsiderate will most definitely ruin her day because it’ll feel like you don’t care about her. It can feel dismissive and make her feel neglected. Being considerate though requires you to take those moments to pause and consider her so that she is not inconvenienced or hurt.
Really, these are gentlemanly qualities.
Guys: your wife may be the type to like some grease under your fingernails, or she may like you in a tweed coat with a stack of essays under your arm as you come through the door. Regardless, what she really wants is to be married to a gentleman.
So be considerate. But also, be dependable.[i] Number Two: Take her for granted. Best started the day after you get back from your honeymoon. Not being considerate can be like taking your wife for granted, but we want to drill a little deeper into this second way to best ruin your wife’s day. Women just love being taken for granted… NOT!
News flash here for you husbands: most men come into marriage with the belief that their wife will keep working on the relationship. Actually, women are significantly more likely than men to carry the belief that couples stop working on their relationship when they marry.
In fact, studies of marital and dating relationships have repeatedly shown that women report lower levels of overall satisfaction and need fulfillment than men. Most women are less satisfied with their marriages than men are.[ii]
Why is this?
This is, in part, because women are more sensitive to conflict, tensions and unmet expectations in their romantic relationships. On top of this,
I take Verlynda for granted sometimes. There’s no escaping the truth. In fact, if you pause for a moment I’m sure you’ll have to admit the same with regards to your spouse.
What’s odd is that it happens so subtly. But when I finally clue in, it’s so obvious. Kind of the like the proverbial frog in the pot.
So let this post serve as a self-check—possibly even a wake-up call—for taking your marriage for granted.
It has been suggested that we start taking our marriages for granted around 3.5 years in. Yet, because taking something for granted can be a real blind spot, I thought it would be worthwhile to start by asking, “What does a satisfying marriage look like?”
We all have blind spots in our lives. So we need a clear benchmark.
On that note, here are some pointers from a great study completed in 2004 three key markers of a marriage that is NOT being taken for granted (Rosen-Grandon, 2004). Marker #1: Love You gotta have love, right?
“Loving relationships are those in which open communication and agreement on the expression of affection are important”. In a thriving marriage, you’ll have a couple that agree that characteristics like respect, forgiveness, romance, support, and sensitivity are openly communicated in ways that are meaningful to both spouses.
Here’s a quick checklist on that:
How are you doing on open communication? Are you making yourself known? Are you truly bringing all of yourself, your thought, concerns, cares, and feelings to the marriage? Are you sharing those things with your spouse? Are you openly expressing affection? How? Is that how your spouse most appreciates the expression of affection?
Marker #2: Loyalty So you can imagine if you’re going to uphold the first marker and bare your soul, you want to choose to do that with a person who is totally loyal. And to be that person for your spouse as well.
Loyalty is based on three critical components:
A lifetime commitment to the marriage. Commitment is critical, obviously. You need to be a person who your spouse sees as being totally committed to the covenant you’ve established before God. Keep your vows. Don’t have a wandering heart or a wandering eye. Loyalty is observed through behavior. Prioritizing your spouse. Specifically, you will defend your spouse. Over and above your parents and even your children. There’s an abundance of marriage research that says if you take care of your spouse you’ll do more for your kids than by making them #1. So point your heart towards your spouse. Strong moral values. If loyalty is important to marital success than this one is obvious. Want to create uncertainty, jealousy, suspicion, or anxiety? Just have low moral values. Works every time. But if you’re trying to build a marriage that is as solid as a rock, this is a key feature.
Loyalty needs to be clearly observed in a marriage that portends to be taken seriously. Marker #3: Shared Values Pulling together brings meaning to your life goals and dreams. This is not a profound concept so I don’t have a lot to say about it other than that it is very important that you get these shared values out into the open.
Sometimes we hold a particular value based on a goal or dream-like an oyster. Nobody (even our spouse) can see this beautiful pearl until we bring it out into the open.
Often, when I see a couple just gridlocked on an issue, one of the spouses has a value in there somewhere that has never seen daylight. But it’s super important to him or her.
Have you shared all of your values with your spouse? And explained exactly how much they mean to you?
To summarize this section: love, loyalty, and values. If you’re taking your marriage for granted, you’ll likely not be on the same page on at least one of these three issues.
What If I Am Taking My Marriage For Granted?
I want to pivot now and give you five key strategies that you can take into your marriage. Try to pick one or two off the list below and just be really intentional about w...
Back to school means a change in routine for many families.
Summer holidays are over (or, will be shortly) and once September arrives we’re into a new rhythm.
Verlynda and I thought that this adjustment was the perfect opportunity to make sure you prioritize your marriage as you adjust to the new routine.
Back To School: Back To Normal This is the last of our shorter episodes this summer, so we’re getting back into our own routines as well!
What we want you to think about is putting some priority on your marriage as part of getting back into the routine. Healthy Marriage Routines Here are some ideas for you to consider on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis. Daily:
Make sure you have a ritual of greetings and departures (take time for a good hug and a kiss when you are separating or reuniting as you go about your daily schedules) Have a time to connect. Just the two of you. You should be able to make something happen most days. For us, we have breakfast together every morning after the kids get on the school bus. Keep in touch. A quick phone call or a few text messages. It’s good to keep each other informed a little. Pray together. Having this as a daily routine really helps you keep on the same page. It’s hard to pray together if you’re out of sync with each other.
Weekly:
Aim for one serious conversation each week. Or maybe I should say ‘intimate’ instead of ‘serious’. Good heart to heart about what is going on in life. When can you schedule this in so that it happens consistently? Can you swing a date once a week? For us, this is a challenge but we have been pretty good at scheduling lunch together every second week. Are you going to church together? Spiritual routines form a focal point in your family that just helps ground everyone in what really matters. I really believe this should be a weekly commitment.
Monthly:
At a minimum, try to aim for one date together every month. I recognize a lot of us have some pretty busy lives but if we get to the end of them and our marriage is broken: do you really think we’re going to feel like we’ve lived well?
Annual:
Can you plan a getaway together? Just the two of you. If so, pick a spot and figure out a budget. And then save up for it so the financial commitment doesn’t take away from the pleasure of your time together. Family holidays. We actually forgot to plan this for 2015 and it’s made life a little tougher trying to make these happen on the fly. We are definitely putting this back on the list for 2016. Family holidays just help everyone share good times which is really healthy.
Next Week We’re back to our regular programming next week with our usual research-based approach. We’ve had a good summer and hope you have too!
Another quick summer episode here as we take a break from our usual programming.
And, contrary to what you might assume from the title, we’re not going to ask you to do anything illegal!
A Graffiti Tag for Your Marriage Our graffiti tag is simple. It just looks like C+V.
But we have fun putting it in different places.
We finger-paint it onto dirty windows, in frosty windows, even under our first Ikea kitchen table. Hey, I even emblazoned it on our lawn with herbicide!
We don’t spray it on railcars or carve it into picnic tables at the park. It’s really just for us. Why Have a Graffiti Tag? This isn’t just a random idea.
I think every couple should have something like this that tells you who you are. To us, this is a symbol of commitment, togetherness, and love. It is a symbol of the bond we cherish.
So we stick it different places. Surprise each other with it. It’s a reminder of our commitment to one another.
If you think it’s cheesy – that’s fine. But I want to challenge you to think about what you do to remind yourself and your spouse about the bond between you.
The wedding rings you wear are great but you get used to them and kinda forget about them, right? So whether you choose to have a graffiti tag or some other symbol between you, choose something that will serve as a reminder down through the years of that bond that you cherish.
For us, it’s a touchstone. Lots of things change through the years but C+V is always there.
How about for you?
Marriage can seem pretty complicated.
There are scores of websites, hundreds of books and thousands of research articles.
And yet folks -- perhaps even yourselves – are still struggling.
Sticky Notes Are Simple Sometimes it’s nice just to back off from all that complexity. Think simple thoughts. Do simple things that make a difference.
In this week’s shorter summer episode (still on holidays – yay!) we take a break from our usual research-based programming to remind you that simple still works.
In this case, following the theme of using romantic text messages from our previous post, we want you to think about how you can use sticky notes to spice up your marriage. Sticky Notes = Happiness The thought behind this strategy is to engage in small activities that are easy to do but build fondness and admiration into your marriage.
You need lots of that. According to Dr. John Gottman we need 5 positive moments for every negative moment in our marriage
Sticky notes are an easy way to do that. You can court your spouse with them. You can add some fun to your marriage with them. And you can use them as little sparks to light the fire in your marriage.
Generally, life is fairly stressful. You’re likely facing a lot of challenges. But these little moments of positivity create buffers against stress and its impact on your marriage. Romantic Sticky Notes We want you to be intentional about this. Sticky notes are inexpensive but they can add a lot of value to your marriage!
You can use them to surprise your spouse. You can use them to remind your spouse. You can stick them anywhere. Try:
A lunch bag In his or her vehicle On the mirror in the washroom In the kitchen sink In a purse or briefcase Under the pillow In the underwear drawer Out in the workshop
Wondering what to write on them? Well, you don’t have a lot of space so it has got to be meaningful and pithy. How about:
Bible verses Words of affirmation and praise Gratitude and appreciation 30 things you love about her (one per note; number them 1/30, 2/30 etc. and hide them all over) Encouragement “I love you!” Suggestive comments. Just because you got married doesn’t mean you need to stop flirting with your spouse! Coupons (“This sticky note is good for one 15 minute massage” is a good start!)
Give it a shot. Let us know how it goes!
I think that one of the lamest things to do is to break up a relationship by text message.
Lame, lame, lame.
But you're married now and looking for a way to keep the flame alive, right? So, today as part of our mini-series of short summer episodes we're looking at a redemptive use of text messages: romancing your spouse!
Romantic Texts Help You Keep Connected Text messaging works great for this because it is so quick and easy. Not to make it sound cheap. Quite the opposite, actually.
Marriage is a big deal. A very big deal. But even the simple, quick tokens of love that can be sent via text message go a long way to creating resilience and positivity in your marriage.
And when you shoot a quick, heartfelt text to your wife or husband, it can be really touching because it shows that you are thinking of them. The unprompted spontaneity is heartwarming. Romantic Text Ideas We've got a PDF of great ideas you can download but first, let me give you the general concept.
The best text messages are going to be those that come from your own heart in your own words.
So here are some general ideas to workaround:
Something you appreciate about your spouse How about flirting? or be suggestive? "I love you" out of the blue always hits the mark Gratitude and appreciation. Simple is fine: thank him/her for making your lunch! How about a Bible verse that is encouraging? Share something you just discovered that speaks to a mutual interest Strengthen him/her in some area where you know he/she doubts himself Express your commitment and loyalty
FREE GUIDE: 50 Romantic Text Messages This PFD has plenty of fresh ideas that will inspire you to romance your spouse!Get the Guide! How Is This Helping? What this is doing is helping you develop your fondness and admiration system. That system is a core resiliency in thriving marriages that will help you weather the stress and challenges that life throws at you.
It also helps buffer you against the conflict that we all experience in our marriages.
We'd love to hear from you! What is the most romantic thing your spouse has ever texted you?
Most wedding speeches are lame.
There, I said it. Somebody needed to.
We have a lot of listeners tuning into our podcast because they're getting ready for marriage. If that is you, and if you are the groom, in particular, I would like you to heed the advice herein.
Epic Wedding Speech-making Your wedding speech is an opportunity to be legendary.
The competition is nearly non-existent (think, "...and I'd like to thank Betsy for ALL the work she did on the centerpieces...yawn).
Most wedding speeches are just a tiresome list of thanks spieled off after a reception that has already gone on too long.
My proposal is that you, the groom, think about how you can add a personal touch to your speech that will leave an impression that adds honour to the occasion. The Five Keys to a Great Wedding Speech 1. What She Means to You Yes, She. She Who Must Be Obeyed. Lol.
Seriously: I want you to provide heartfelt testimony to the incredible attractiveness of your spouse in front of all who are in attendance.
If you can't think of content for this testimony: think about how you can end the engagement as respectfully as possible.
But, if you're like me and you sincerely believe you're one of those guys who just landed the gal of his dreams then you'll have plenty of content.
Tell them what she means to you. 2. How She Has Impacted You Already This builds on #1 by providing your audience with real examples of the impact that this incredible woman has already had for good in your life.
Again, if she is the girl of your dreams you should be able to come up with some real examples and genuine commentary on what a blessing she has been to you. 3. Why You Cherish Her Now Your relationship will unfold over years to come. It's a journey.
But for where you are at today, your wedding day, I am calling on you to speak to why you cherish her at this moment. What are the values, attitudes, beliefs and character traits that make her so precious to you? 4. Why I Am Attracted To You If you have been speaking about your wife, this is the point you turn to her and speak from your heart.
Tell her why you are so absolutely struck by her that there is nobody else in the world you would consider marrying. 5. Ice the Cake If she's not in tears (the warm fuzzy feeling kind of tears) this is where you just put the finishing touches on the speech in your own words.
Pause.
"{Her name}, I love you. Thank you for marrying me."
Pause And Then The Rest of It Yes, you should do your thank you's. But before that, turn to her parents for a moment and speak to them. Now, I don't know what you think of your in-laws. But if it is all possible to honestly and authentically do so, you should thank them for their daughter. They've had a lot of influence on forming her character. They all say "We're gaining a son today" but really, they're losing their daughter. You're setting up a new family unit with her and they know it's going to be a new relationship for them. So thank them.
And then, last, but not least, the sincere thank you's for all the other folks who made the day special. Be authentic but also be methodical. What I Didn't Do That I Wish I Had Looking back, there's one thing I wish I had done. I wish I had paused to thank God for Verlynda, for our marriage, and for all of our loved ones and friends who came to celebrate the day with us.
I've done it many times since, but if I could one thing differently that would be on the list for sure.
Those are my thoughts. Now, it's your turn! What is (or was) the favorite part of your wedding speech?
Have you ever been in that place? You know, you come home from work… the house is a mess… you don’t want to be there… you’re yelling at the kids… you’re yelling at your spouse because your environment is a mess but it’s like your inside is a mess and your emotions are a mess too. Nobody likes to live like that.
Not only that – it’s not good for you either. That’s why we interviewed Marla Cilley, a housekeeping guru commonly known as FlyLady, for some tips on how to get out of this chaos.
You'll definitely want to listen to this interview from start to finish!
First, though, I was curious if there was any scientific research surrounding stress levels and home environments. It turns out there is. Wives who described their homes as more restorative (meaning they enjoyed their home environment) had lower stress levels and less depressed mood across the day.
Conversely, wives who described their homes as more stressful had indicators (a flatter slope of diurnal cortisol) of chronic stress. Those indicators are typically associated with adverse health outcomes.
Apparently, husbands are not affected so much by the home environment, as there was really a null result for them. The conclusion is that wives feel more responsibility for the home environment.[i]
The same researcher found an association between wive’s marital satisfaction and the flatter slop of diurnal cortisol. We all know that correlation doesn’t imply causation, but we think it is reasonable to conclude that if you find your home environment stressful, particularly as a wife, you’ll likely to have decreased marital satisfaction. The converse is true as well.[ii]
So, I think it is safe to say that taking care of your home is another way of taking care of your marriage. We are not asking wives to do this, but we want both of you to take this seriously and figure out how to divide up the responsibilities.
Not only does the research show that home environments affect the diurnal cortisol which impacts marital satisfaction, but the same theme carries over to parenting. Findings show that maladaptive parenting styles and child emotionality both increase in cluttered homes. The researchers saw this as being mediated by maternal tenseness.[iii]
The case we’re making here is that creating a home environment that is peaceful and has some sense of serenity and calm is a blessing to your marriage and your family.
That’s why we interviewed FlyLady – to ask her how to help young couples get their homes organized and kept tidy.
She gave us some awesome information including:
Where to start – especially if you’ve got a company A different focus for each month of the year How to build a routine How to get rid of your perfectionism How to break your home into zones so it’s not so overwhelming How to create that relaxing environment you want to come home to How to save money in the kitchen.
FREE RECORDING: Interview Transcript You can download a complete transcript (PDF format) of the entire interview. The Flylayd herself said she'd never laid all her methods out like this in one spot before, so it's a great resource.Get the Recording!
Thanks again to Marla Cilley for providing such masterful content to us all! You can find more about her at www.flylady.net and be sure to follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
For more great content on how to make your marriage thriving and passionate, be sure to sign up for our email list now. You only stand to benefit from it!
References
[i] Darby E. Saxbe and Rena Repetti, “No Place Like Home: Home Tours Correlate With Daily Patterns of Mood and Cortisol,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36, no. 1 (2010): 71–81, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0146167209352864.
[ii] Darby E. Saxbe, Rena L. Repetti, and Adrienne Nishina, “Marital Satisfaction, Recovery from Work, and Diurnal Cortisol among Men and Women,” Health Psychology: Official Journal of the Division of Health Psychology,
Even if it feels impossible at this moment, I want you to know that it is possible to rebuilt trust, to create safety and to restore intimacy to your marriage. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy or simple. I can’t even promise that your trust will never be broken again. But I am saying that it is possible.
In every human relationship, probably without exception, there are moments of betrayal. This has been happening for millennia: think even of the words of King David in Psalm 41:9, “Even my close friend in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted his heel against me.”
Jesus Christ himself was betrayed, so know that you’re not alone. He understands, he’s been there. It happens to everyone.
As common as it is though, there may be no blow as severe as a betrayal – we feel it keenly. The good news though, is that it doesn’t have to be fatal to your marriage.
If you are the injured party, this post is especially for you. We hope it will be a comfort to you as well as help you figure out how to move forward after a betrayal.
FREE RECORDING: For the Betrayer This special recording speaks directly to the one who has injured their spouse. If you want to make things right, Caleb recorded these specific strategies to help you reconcile things with the spouse you've betrayed.Get the Recording!
If you have been betrayed, there is a process you’re going to go through. Of course, your own journey is always unique but here’s typically what we see when working with couples in distress following the disclosure of an extramarital affair, perceived abandonment, disclosure of a pornography addiction, or even major changes of lifestyle and values and even religion.
Generally there are three phases:[i]
Roller Coaster Moratorium Trust building
Stage 1: Roller Coaster This is no surprise here. Researchers wrote that “initial responses to a partner’s disclosure of infidelity were often intensely emotionally charged” which makes perfect sense.
We see folks swinging between severe grief and numbness to thoughts of murder and escape. There is often a lot of confrontation and anger being expressed and a flood of conflicting emotions going on.
These conflictions emotions are wanting to get past the offense but at the same time refusing to. Or, wanting revenge by doing the same thing, but hating what has been done, etc. No matter what feelings are going on here, they are very strong. You can see why it is called the roller coaster stage.
The important part here is being willing to express the strong emotions to trusted confidante’s: a counsellor, a church leader you can trust, and to your spouse who has injured you. He/she needs to see your pain. Stage 2: Moratorium When the emotional reactivity slows down and you find yourself trying to make meaning of the betrayal, you’ve moved into the moratorium stage. This period typically involves quite a bit of obsessing about details, retreating or pulling back from your spouse physically and emotionally, and recruiting the support of others to try to make meaning of the betrayal.
As a cautionary note: If this was a sexual betrayal, obsessing about details is not always healthy. You need enough to make you feel safe, but if you start getting all sorts of voyeuristic details, they’ll create memories and images that will be very difficult for you to overcome.
According to the researchers, here’s what you probably should know in the case of an affair:[ii]
Who the extramarital partner was How long the affair lasted How often they met Where they met.
If you find yourself on an endless search for facts, it may be because it is easier to talk about facts than feelings. When you feel yourself going down this pathway, as the betrayed spouse, stop and think about what you are feeling and what you need. You are probably needing reassurance that your spouse wants to work on the marriage and still finds you attractive and loveable. Learn to be more vocal about this and focus on feelings,
So, what if your parents didn’t have a great marriage? Or, maybe other folks who served as role models in your life haven’t modeled a healthy, thriving marriage? Are you hooped, or is there hope? Let’s figure out if there’s any hope.
If you are in this situation of having poor role models, you are not alone. This is such a common, shared experience. We all try to do our best as a couple, but even then, I’m sure our kids can see things that they like and will adopt from our relationship, but also see other things they’re not going to want to carry forward.
We all face this challenge of role models, to varying degrees, so be encouraged!
The first thing we need to remember is that all role models are useful. We all think the positive ones are, but negative ones can be as well. What the research shows about human behavior is that when we want to add positive, beneficial activities to our lives we look for positive role models. For example, if I want to work out more often, I will choose a fit person as a role model.
On the other hand, when we want to remove unhelpful behaviors, such as over-eating, we may consider a very obese person as a role model. That is an example of a useful negative role model.[i]
We use positive role models to help us engage in beneficial activities and negative role models to sustain our motivation to refrain from negative activities. So, no matter what role models you had, they all are useful either as something you want to imitate or avoid.
Another challenge when thinking about our role models is to remember that role models are very rarely ALL bad or ALL good. We want to be selective and wise and put things in the right buckets. It’s really about taking the good and leaving the bad, or as Caleb says, eating the meat and spitting out the bones!
There is an interesting cultural difference too when it comes to role models. European descendants are far more inspired and motivated by positive role models who highlight a strategy of pursuing success. More collectivistic cultures, however, such as Asian-American, are more motivated by negative role models with a strategy to avoid failure.
Your cultural background is going to influence how much value or importance you place on each type of role model.[ii]
Let’s take a moment to look at the root causes. How do our early role models affect our ability to relate today?
Caleb values attachment theory when looking at early childhood role models. “The basic tenet of attachment theory is that the accessibility and responsiveness of a trusted other leads to greater social and emotional adjustment at any age.”[iii]
This is saying that our ability to relate to others is formed by our childhood caregivers. The kind of atmosphere our caregivers gave us for establishing relationships affects even how we relate to people today. If our caregivers did not provide a safe, secure environment, we may struggle in our relationships, as we grow older.
The good news is that attachment can improve in the context of a secure relationship. Be that trusted other for your spouse!
The first part in doing this is to create safety within your marriage. Make it a shared value to respect one another. Avoid name-calling, barbed comments, teasing sprinkled with sarcastic truth, and any forms of criticism or contempt. Agree to create a culture within your marriage where safety is a fundamental, inviolable principle.
So, even if you didn’t have good role models, make a covenant with your spouse that you are committed to making the marriage safe. This doesn’t mean the absence of conflict, it just means you’re committed to growing the sense of security and repairing breaches when they are made.
Abuse, of any kind, is so damaging to a marriage because the fundamental principles of an intimate emotional bond such as marriage are based on safety and security. With abuse, these are completely abandoned and violated.
The second part in improving attachment in your marriage is listen...
Because debt reduction is fundamentally a mental issue, not a financial one, this may be a different take on debt reduction that what you might be used to hearing. We’ll give some practical strategies and tactics, but first let’s figure out HOW we think about debt.
Finances are a major stressor for most marriages, so here is a checkpoint for you personally. You might already know this, but if you’re not 100% sure, sit down with your spouse and ask them what meanings they assign to debt. Ask the questions: How does debt impact you or affect you? What do you feel when you think about the debt we have right now?
I know that Caleb and I experience debt differently, but empathy comes from understanding. Caleb is more comfortable with debt, as long as he has a sense that his income will cover the payments to repay it, but because he knows that I am less comfortable with it (as in, totally-anxious, make-me-sick uncomfortable), he is very considerate and will not go into debt without me being totally on board with it first.
How we think about debt is critical, so today, we start with the psychology that you need to wrap your mind around before you think about what you can wrap your income around.
To give you a frame for background, let’s look at some research. In 2011, 63 couples with great marriages were asked about their finances.[i]
A few themes became clear showing that part of the success of great marriages is due to a careful, effective reduction of debt. Happy couples were more likely to pay off debt as quickly as possible. They were less likely to use credit cards at all, or just used them as a convenience and paid them off monthly. The couple shared the common goal of debt reduction.
Common goals are critical because if you can’t agree on this, it’s not going to be possible to move forward to debt reduction. If this is your situation, you’re either going to have to accept the reality that your spouse isn’t going to change or find another way to have a conversation about debt that your spouse can relate to. When you do that, you’re giving them a choice whether they want to act out of a place of empathy or choose to disregard your concerns. All you can do it put it out there to start with.
Another theme that showed up in this study was that some couples started with a debt-free philosophy and others came to it over time. This is helpful as you have to see yourself as creating a great marriage and get comfortable with the fact that you are in development together. Give it time – give your mutual commitment to debt reduction time to develop and shape itself in your marriage as part of your common goal settings.
The question arises though: if debt reduction is a critical part of a successful marriage, why is it so hard to actually get on the same page about it?
There are actually predictors of debt found through some extensive research studies. For example, one study found that health status and levels of changes in income are very robust predictors of debt in general.
In other words, if your health is poor and/or your income never changes over an extended period of time, you’re most likely to be in debt.
The same study found that for intermittent and chronic debt, locus of control, family structure during adolescence, socioeconomic status, work effort, and marital status are robust predictors. Self-esteem also plays specifically into chronic debt.
Anything considered to be a disadvantage in life generally is indeed a disadvantage with regards to debt reduction. Sounds discouraging… Let’s look at Locus of Control a little closer.
Locus of Control (LOC) is a concept from personality psychology that puts your personal belief about whether you have control over life or not on a continuum from external to internal. If it’s external you believe that fate, or God, or chance really initiates all the things that happen in your life. If it’s internal you believe that you have control over all of the things that happen wit...
Ever get nailed by a surprise bill? Yeah, you knew insurance was due for the year but you thought it wasn’t till next month? This episode is about pain relief! More specifically, relief from the impact of those bigger, occasional, or annual bills.
Not only do we need to keep track of our everyday expenses and budget for them, we also need to set up the part of our budget that deals with mid and long term planning. Emergencies also arise, so being prepared for those is very important too.
We often fall into the if-then trap of “If I won the lottery, then everything would be fine financially”. Ironically, most lottery winners totally train wreck their lives. The words of the Bible are so true, “Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it.” (Proverbs 13:11).
Because this is so true, we need to step away from this if-then principle and start working on consistent strategies of gathering little by little. Another reason to start this is most of us are not going to win the lottery, have huge inheritances from our parents, or a windfall from the stock market!
There is something called the family stress theory which predicts that improved communication about finances should decrease hostility and increases warmth and supportive behaviours.
You need to talk through all this budgeting stuff with your spouse because not only is financial stewardship the right thing to do, but it is also a significant factor in improving the quality of your marriage relationship.
FREE WORKSHEET Family Budget Planning This worksheet is a useful and simple budgeting calculator ideal for getting you on the right track with your family budget. Get the Worksheet!
The researchers cited that financial factors predict 15% of marital satisfaction. That’s a lot of satisfaction based on ONE factor! This means that the greater your financial problems, the lower the quality of your relationship. Financial issues create emotional distress and part of reducing that stress is not only budgeting month to month but also making sure you have a plan for the larger bills and for creating long term savings for yourselves.[i] Long-Term or Retirement Savings One great strategy to creating wealth for the future is to find a financial advisor. The intentionality and the relationship you build with your advisor forms a kind of accountability and helps you get real and determined about your savings.
People who use a financial advisor:
End up establishing long term goals and work towards filling them Actually, sit down and calculate their financial needs for retirement Create savings accounts dedicated to retirement Increase the amount of money they save regularly Report greater retirement confidence Accumulate significantly higher levels of emergency funds.
If you want these things to be true of you, then you might seriously consider getting a financial advisor who is trained and qualified in helping you create your own retirement savings plan.[ii] Since we got ours, it has created useful discussion and helped us to be very clear, consistent and confident about our own savings.
Another way to make wealth grow is by living within your means and saving. Here are four key concepts to think about:
Keep finances simple and live within your means. Get loans paid off: credit lines or equity loans, automobile loans and credit card debt. All these things enable you to live beyond your means. Save and invest 10% of your earned income annually. This is especially critical if you are employed as a wage-earning family. Whatever proceeds come from your investments, that income should be reinvested, ideally, all of it. Interest income should be put back into the investments as a long-term strategy to multiply your wealth. Exchange wealth-depreciating assets for wealth-creating assets. [For example, if you were to exchange the asset value of your 50k main vehicle, your 30k second vehicle and your 40k camper trailer a...
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Today we’re getting into the nitty-gritty of HOW to create a family budget. We’ve done budgets and had to revisit them. We haven’t always been consistent with keeping a budget with moves and job transitions. But when we are budgeting, the stress in our marriage is much lower!
First, let’s clarify what we know from what we don’t know. We know:
That there are many sound, recommended financial practices That these practices come from reliable sources That following these financial practices actually works and produces greater net worth and increased life satisfaction That only a minority of people uses them.
Which leads us to what we don’t know:
We don’t know why we frequently do not use them We don’t know why, when we do use these tools, we don’t always use them properly. This scenario is typical for most families.[i]
So let's talk about discussing your budget and the role that personal qualities play in the likelihood of your success in establishing a budget before turning to the steps by which you'll create your own budget. Discussing Your Family Budget It’s difficult to have a productive discussion about the budget itself because most couples do not discuss the meanings they give to budgeting. So have a discussion with your spouse to get this stuff out on the table. Don’t fight about what to spend or attempt to talk to each other into budgeting, just aim for understanding. Your spouse is not on board? This is not the time for hot debate. Rather, seek to understand WHY your spouse does not want to actually follow through with the budget. What is the meaning behind the resistance? It's been my experience (Caleb) in working with couples that there is often a valid reason why resistance is present. You need to do this because it’s no fun banging out an awesome budget only to have your spouse say, “Good for you! Let me know how that goes!” That sucks… So make sure you’re on the same page by having a good discussion first. Often if you can get to a discussion at the meanings level, you'll be able to connect and get on the same page. Listening to understand is a vital skill for this type of conversation. Remember, you’re not alone. If you can’t settle on this together, reach out for help and we’ll set up some coaching. Understand Personal Qualities So after you’ve discussed and understood the meanings you each ascribe to budgets, the next step is to grasp the impact your personal qualities have on budgeting. For example, discipline (as a quality) and knowledge (of financial matters) are qualities that impact one’s ability to establish and follow a budget. Possessing these qualities will help you make progress against your financial goals.[ii] If you don’t feel you have these qualities: don’t fret. It's gonna be ok. What this means is that budgeting is possible for everyone who wants to do it because personal qualities can be developed and action is a result of choice. Anyone can make choices. So be encouraged! Have a good conversation to find out where each of you are at, then make decisions together and take action. Again, it’s not unrealistic to think that you might need to reach out for help. Creating Your Family Budget Caleb blended content from both the Australian government (ASIC)[iii] and Dave Ramsey to provide a robust description of how to create your budget in this episode.[iv] Both resources are really valuable, and we’re taking the best of both of them and blending them because they really get along well. We know it can be overwhelming to create a budget, so let’s break it down. There are four steps here:
Track your current spending Compare money in and money out Prioritize where you want your money to go Take steps to make your money work for you.
[callout]Get instant access to the MS Excel Family Budget Worksheet! If you’re the type of person that prefers to work with a template that is already laid out, we have an awesome Microsoft Excel workbook we’d like to email you a link to.
Negotiating a family budget can be a real fire-starter for some couples. We may know we need a budget and want to live within our means, but the fights that the discussions cause can be so painful, that it’s easier to avoid them. We want to change that today.
For Caleb and I, a lot of our own frustration about money in the past has been because we never got ourselves on the same page. He would get a raise and think he had more spending power – I thought we’d have more to save. Then we’d both be frustrated!
We’ve psycho-analyzed ourselves and have figured this out somewhat:
Caleb had little to no visibility into our budget. It wasn’t because I was hiding it, but we had never made a point of really talking it through and figuring it out. We have different saving philosophies. Caleb believes he’ll create wealth through his career and end up ahead. I believe wealth is created by saving money regularly. On the budget we let the discussion be more about what you wanted vs. what I wanted instead of starting with the reality of what we could and couldn’t afford. Good financial management is not about winning certain arguments - it’s about making sure your outflows are less than your inflows. In our case, instead of going to the numbers, we’d just go to frustration between us. Our personalities: I feel best/most satisfied around finances when we’re saving. Caleb feels best when he is spending. He claims he’s a therapist and part of his self-care is retail therapy! It has taken us a while to be together on our money. It was never a critical issue but it’s been stressful more than most other issues so I think we’re typical.
Given that we understand how stressful negotiating finances can be, we want to give you some skills to negotiate this with your spouse.
The Psychology and Psychiatry Journal published some research by Capital One, a major North American credit card provider (which may be more than slightly biased!). Some quick facts from their research:
93% of those surveyed believe their spouse is open to discussing money issues 25% disagree with their spouse about money at least once a month Younger people are more prone o conflicts with their spouse about money 76% believe they share the same philosophy as their spouse when it comes to managing money, such as saving vs. spending. The younger the couple, the more this figure drops 65% of couples report having the recommended 3 to 6 months emergency savings fund. (We don’t believe this…) Most spouses spend independently of each other and only consult if it’s over a certain dollar amount.[i]
There are no real horror-stats around family budgeting except for the following from the Federal Reserve, a US government institution. As of February 2015 there were:
$4.5 billion in outstanding car loans $12 billion in consumer credit card debt Just under $10 billion in 24-month consumer debt loans.[ii]
Given these statistics, we can see that there must be more financial stress in marriages than Capital One is reporting.
Remember there are also gender differences when it comes to managing money. In 2002, 62% of households reported that savings and investment decisions were made jointly. Men were the primary decision-makers for 26% of households and in 12% of households the female was the primary decision-maker.[iii]
Bernasek & Bajtelsmit also found that women’s involvement in household financial decisions increased with their share of household income and their formal financial education implying that women are more likely to have an influence on financial decisions when they contribute a larger income share to the household.
These results support a bargaining approach to influencing the household. Power, in terms of involvement in making important financial decisions, is greater the more command an individual has over financial and educational resources. (ie. If I make more than you, and I am more skilled financially than you,
Budgeting can feel like such a ball and chain. Why is it such a pain point for so many of us?
This is the first article in a mini-series on Family Budgeting. Today we make a case for WHY you need to budget.
Usually, every relationship has a spender and a saver. Caleb is our spender, and I am our saver/budgeter! It has taken us a while to negotiate that. For example, we both want a retirement fund. However, Caleb wants to create that wealth by generating revenue, and I want to create that wealth by saving. There’s a big difference there! One that has caused a bit of friction in our relationship…
Caleb and I also get stressed about different things. He stresses most about making an income and always wants more than he has. I get stressed about balancing our budget. Believe me, we’re still figuring this out as we go.
We’ve learned a lot along our fifteen years of marriage that is really helpful for us, and we want to see also what the research has to say so that you can really be together on this part of your marriage as well.
In 2000, Kerkmann conducted a study of young married couples that were students with modest financial resources. He found that “financial management behaviors (defined as budgeting expenses against income) and the perception of how well finances were managed were both significantly related to satisfaction with their marriages.
Financial problems (mismatch between financial resources and demands), as well as the perceived magnitude of financial problems, showed a statistically significant correlation with how satisfied the chief financial manager was with his/her marriage.”
As a result of regression analysis, Kerkmann found that 13-15% of marital satisfaction was explained by the perceived quality of financial management and financial problems.[i]
It is interesting to note that perception is more important than reality. You have to believe you’re doing a good job. It is not you compared to others, it is just you that needs to be satisfied with how your finances are handled.
I questioned the fact that it was ok to have debt as long as both spouses were ok with it, so Caleb explained that all the research was saying was if the perception of the couple is that they were managing their debt well, they would be more satisfied. BUT, we need to look at more research to get the big picture.
Here is some background information about the debt that Dew assembled in 2008:
the average American household has consumer debt equal to 20% of their yearly income recently married couples typically have high levels of debt and take on debt as they establish their new household (go out and buy a bunch of stuff using debt) debt generally predicts increases in marital conflict and that newlyweds rated debt as their second-highest marital concern.
Dew wanted to find out how a change in debt predicted a change in marital satisfaction for newlyweds. He found that as couples assumed debt, they were more likely to:
spend less time together argue more about their finances, and feel that their marriage was unfair.
He points out that all of these findings suggest that consumer debt (debt incurred on the purchase of consumable goods/goods that do not appreciate[ii]) may inhibit recently married couple’s attempts to form a new family unit.[iii]
Right at the point, you’re trying to create this new happy, blissful experience, you go buy a bunch of things you think you need in order to support that happiness but you actually end up sabotaging the whole thing.
So, even if you’re both good with the debt you’re incurring, and believe it’s OK, there are other factors undermining the happiness you’re aiming for.
Later on, Dew looked at the relationship between debt and divorce.
There’s a bit of a conundrum here as materialism is negatively associated with marital satisfaction. However, the more assets a couple has the less likely they are to divorce. To sum it up: more materialism = less satisfaction with your marr...
Life is busy. So busy. But so often we let other people and other things run our schedules and in the process of allowing this to happen: what really matters to us gets bumped. Like time with our spouse…Date nights…Fun nights…Just time to hang out. What can we do to change that?
We all hit phases in life that are busy. It is totally normal! If this is you right now, don’t worry, it doesn’t mean your marriage is done – you’ve done well just to recognize the stage you’re in.
I like the phrase from the Bible verse from Ecclesiastes 9:9 which says “Enjoy life with your wife”! Sometimes we get so serious about life that we forget to create good times together, but marriage researchers have known for a long time that happily married couples enjoy leisure activities together. This is evident in the research as far back as 1951 – married people have been having fun for quite a while!
A particular pair of researchers way back then wanted to look particularly at the crowd of married folk who were transitioning to parenthood for the first time. They found that initially, leisure time dropped but then started to go back up after the first several weeks of new parenting had passed.
However, here’s what is interesting. They looked at leisure before marriage as well. If there was SHARED leisure prenatally, there was more marital love and less conflict one year later. If there was only independent leisure prenatally, there was less love and more conflict 1 year later.
SO: creating shared leisure time is good! Build positivity into your marriage as a buffer against future stress.[i]
The good news is that in marriages today, more married couples are sharing leisure time than was happening in 2003, 1975, or back in 1965. In this study, the researchers found that dual-earner couples spent less time in the presence of their spouse than single-earner couples. If you’re a dual-earner couple, this is tougher for you.
They also found, not surprisingly, that the presence of children equated to a drop in the amount of joint leisure time with a spouse.[ii]
Again, this is a normal situation to find yourself in. Many folks feel that they’re the only ones struggling, but they’re not. You are not alone. We all face these challenges! So, what can we do about all of this?
First thing – drop the idea of time management. You can’t manage time. Time happens whether you think you’re managing it or not. Thinking too hard about trying to force time to do something for you means that you’re giving he power over to something outside your control. You can’t stop time or make it go slower!
What you can manage is your SELF! Forget about time management and think about self-management.
FREE GUIDE: Weekly Planning Calendar This weekly calendar is what Caleb uses each week. Use it to see how to manage your time and then customize it for yourself.Get the Calendar! So, how can we bring this into our daily lives? First, think about WHAT you do when you are together. How do you manage yourself during the time you have together?
Here are some things for you to think about: 1. Most couple’s time together is meal times, the evening and night. 2. Do not cut back on sleep. As Shawn Stevenson told us in episode 38, sleep impacts the quality of your marriage. Again, do not cut back on sleep! 3. Think about the role of TV and movies in your life. Caleb and I do not own a TV, nor do we subscribe to Netflix or any such streaming service. We do breath oxygen and put our pants on one leg at a time, so we’re not totally weird! The decision to live free from all sources of streaming media is a huge blessing to our family because we have WAY more time together, and when we’re together we’re not distracted by the TV or watching a movie. Think seriously about how much time you spend watching TV and video. Have you heard the saying, “We’re all in this together – alone”? Look at the time you have together and remove the ‘alone’ piece. 4. Review your working hours.
So, we’ve had some listeners reach out with some questions about sex, and more specifically, questions about female orgasm. For most young couples getting married you know that while sex is awesome, it takes a while to develop sexual competence.
To give you some great help, we interviewed an expert in the field of sexuality – Shannon Ethridge. She is an awesome resource, one we highly recommend, and we encourage you to reach out to her. The links to find her are at the bottom of this post. Shannon Ethridge’s Story I’d like to share this with you to give you hope! Even if you began your sexual history in ways you are not proud of, you can be an overcomer and be a great sex partner in your marriage.
As an adolescent, Shannon had a very promiscuous sex life. The root cause being she felt so disconnected from her Dad and brother. When Shannon was 4, her 8-year-old sister died. Her family seemed to shut down at that time, so she grew up very hungry for attention and affection.
When she turned 11-12 and started to develop hips and breasts, she had some uncles who taught her how to get attention and affection by playing inappropriate games. That groomed her until she was 14 when she gave her virginity away looking for love, as she says, “in all the wrong places” and starting her on a trajectory of promiscuity for the next 5 or 6 years.
In her early 20’s, she met a 6’7” spiritual giant of a man who was still a virgin. Assuming he wouldn’t want anything to do with a girl like her, she told him a bit about her past. He replied, “Shannon, I don’t love you because of your past, I love you for who you are now and who God created you to be and I want to help you become who God created you to be.”
Unfortunately, as Shannon noted, putting a wedding band on her finger did not transform her sexuality and fix all her problems. It was a few short years into their marriage when Shannon realized she needed to sift through and sort out all her sexual baggage. She had stopped the promiscuity, but in the process had stopped her sexuality for her husband as well.
Shannon had to find a happy medium where she was an active, interested sex partner, but only with her husband. Now, given that they just celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary, I’d say they are a success story!
Another neat thing I found with Shannon is that she and I are both passionate about helping others create their own success story and in this episode, we want to do just that with you, our reader/listener.
Given that part of a successful marriage is a healthy sex life, Shannon and I talked about sex and more specifically female orgasm. What I’ve written below reads more like a blog post, but credit for this great content goes to Shannon! Question: Why is it that men are usually always ready to go, and for women, well, it takes some work to have an orgasm? Men are usually ready at the drop of a hat to have sex, but for them, sex is also finished at the drop of a hat. Women take much longer to reach orgasm, sometimes ten times longer, but it means that she gets to enjoy the pleasure for that much longer. Sex is not a race.
Just because it takes a wife longer, does not mean that she shouldn’t expect her husband to do this for her. If your husband is a good lover, he will enjoy what he is doing for you and have all the patience in the world for you to reach that climactic point.
It takes the average couple 18 years to settle into a really smooth sexual groove together. It may feel like a headache in the first few years of marriage that you’re wired so differently and that you start so differently and that you finish so differently, but work at it and it will become smoother, more enjoyable, and more euphoric.
If you’re a young wife, in those first few years of marriage where you’re trying to find your sexual groove, here are some suggestions for helping your husband help you have an orgasm.
Teach Him How To Touch You
Realize that even though your husband is definite...
We’ve noticed that a lot of marriages take a very traditional approach where all the work HE does is money-earning, and all the work SHE does in unpaid – and usually unacknowledged.
So we ask, is this a good thing, or is it a problem?
What happens for those wives who take on more and more, and might even do all the housework AND are employed full time?
How does that work?
If you are a wife that is struggling because you are overloaded with employment and housework – or a husband in the same situation – what is reasonable? What should your expectations be? How can you work together to create a fair housework division in marriage?
First: some personal insight into how this plays out in our own marriage: For most of our marriage, Caleb has worked in the labour market and I’ve worked at keeping the home. We both like that best, although we have had periods of both of us working too.
During this time, Caleb let me do the dishes and would pitch in the odd time when things were really bad or he felt guilty, or whatever. He realized recently, that he carried an unspoken belief that dishes were part of my job description, not his.
Then he saw an uncle with a similar marriage to ours (she stayed at home, he worked outside the home) that had no concept of the dishes being on her job list and not his. After each meal, he just pitched in… and, so did she… and, so did all of their children. They had some great family mojo going on, and were all together in the kitchen after supper.
This got Caleb reflecting on his own values, and at the end of the day he realized he was just being prideful – like dishes weren’t worth his time and he had more valuable things to do. He also realized it was a power imbalance; that there wasn’t anything intrinsically special or valuable about him over me that means I should do lesser work than he.
The Bible talks about the husband nourishing and cherishing his wife, and about sacrificing himself for her benefit so that she feels loved.[i] He realized he needed to change how he thought about our dishes.
Now, most of the time, we do dishes together! What is really neat is our kids join us and we all do this together without us having to beg or bribe them, turning a chore into some great family time. What’s more, if Caleb or I have something on in the evening, we don’t mind the other not helping with dishes that night. It has given us more freedom and less of a martyr attitude. So that’s how this has played out in our lives, but what does the research say?
In all industrialized countries, the division of household labour remains unbalanced and gender-dependent. Women are still left with the major responsibility for housework and childcare, and wives perform two to three times more family work than their husbands do.[ii]
Here’s what happens that influences perceptions of fairness.
Spouses who have employment reduce their participation in housework. (No surprises there) Most marriages assume that the spouse who creates less (or no) household income should assume a larger share of household work. Traditional women are socialized to accept an unbalanced division of household labour and are cool with this. They believe it’s legitimate. About 45% of women in this worldwide study believed the distribution of household labour was fair. The most influential factor on whether you think the share of housework you do is fair or not is gender ideology (#3 above). Your belief about what is fair is most significant. Which is why in marriage it’s really important to figure how/if these beliefs align, and if not, how you’re going to reconcile them.[iii] Couple more points. If a wife held a full-time job (and low time availability) she felt more injustice if she still did the majority of the housework. If a wife was contributing income equal to, or greater than, her husband, she felt more injustice if she still did the majority of the housework.
What can we deduce from that?
OK. So you had ANOTHER fight - another disagreement. It’s like, man, are we ever going to stop fighting? Remember, the goal is not achieving zero disagreements, it’s learning to disagree productively!
Caleb and I recently had a disagreement. Caleb told the story in our podcast episode: “So I remember a recent disagreement we had. We were actually talking about a Sunday school lesson you were doing in the Old Testament. And you really wanted to emphasize the holiness of God as was expressed in that passage - how we need to revere God and not be flippant or casual about how we approach him.
And I was like, “Well, I think you just want to intimidate these kids so you can force them to behave in a certain way and that isn’t going to create genuine transformation"
Which created a long, awkward silence…
Then, you completely went around my harshness and came back with this very gracious response that totally opened a window into my own issues. And you framed it in the context of how certain values from my own FOO (Family of Origin) conflicted with values from yours, and without worrying about who was right or wrong, how those values influenced how we emphasize differently certain attributes of God’s character.
The irony, of course, is that I was calling you to be more gracious in a very harsh way, but you responded graciously to show me how I was being harsh about being gracious. LOL.” How this relates to our topic today is, we could have had a long argument about theology and why each other was wrong, and probably never would have come to any agreement. This highlights a critical point which Olson et al., pointed out – “the way we handle problems, more than the problems themselves, often can be the problem”.[i]
Let’s look at our example more closely. “The surface problem was theology and how to interpret it. But the real problem was my harshness and I was responding or reacting out of my own junk.
Rather than reacting superficially, you pointed out how I was coming to it and why, and did so softly, in a way I could receive it. That totally topped us from derailing but more than that, it created insight, understanding and growth.” So, how can we disagree without sinking our love boat? Think of it as diffusing a bomb – it’s a much better day for both of you if the conflict is resolved rather than escalated!
1 – Make sure your spouse feels understood.
This comes from giving them space and time to share their feelings and ideas during the disagreement. Take their disagreement seriously. Don’t discount or dismiss your spouse’s concerns.
If it means enough to him or her that she/he has raised something negative or of concern, you have to pay attention. This is all part of making them feel understood. Remember, this is not about the content matter of the disagreement; it’s about HOW you are handling the disagreement.[ii]
This is part of what is called person-centeredness.[iii]
Person-centeredness is the idea of taking information that you’re hearing from your spouse and incorporating that into the discussion you’re having by referring to it in subsequent comments or questions. In doing so, you’re sending a very signal that you’re listening, absorbing, taking this in, and processing it.
You still haven’t agreed with anything so you haven’t had to give up your own beliefs but what is really awesome is you are sending your spouse a very clear, simple message. That message is, “I am not shutting you out. I am hearing you. I get you. Your input matters to me.” That is such a different signal than completely ignoring or dismissing their input!
Have you ever had a disagreement with a person and by the end you’re not even sure if they’ve heard one thing you’ve said? That. Drives. Me. Nuts. It’s psychologically manipulative. I had a boss that wouldn’t even look me in the eye when I was talking to him and just stared over my shoulder. You start to wonder if one of you is not even a human being.
So,
Today we want to give you 10 simple but powerful ways to court your spouse in everyday moments. This isn’t going to be about going out for dinner or going to a movie – not that kind of courting. We’re talking about ways of being together. It’s deeper but still very concrete.
Here’s a little reality about marriage – marriage is hard work. That’s true, but what does it mean? It means is that couples need to continuously engage in behaviors and activities that promote the health of their marriage bond.
Think of it as a love muscle – Use it or lose it! Use this post as a day at the gym, complete with supplements, some cardio, and some strength training all for that love muscle. In fact, we even have a worksheet you can download to help you work through the content of this post.
There’s a little proverb written by King Solomon that speaks to this, embedded in a fairly steamy passage of the Bible. He says, “Rejoice in the wife of your youth”, and that just encapsulates what we cover in this post.
We want you to delight in each other, to invest in each other, and to enjoy each other!
Think of ‘marriage is hard work’ as ‘marriage is good hard work’. It can be fun and joyful to create this time of marriage, really! It won’t make the marriage perfect or free from stress or times of frustration, but you can have a really good time creating it. Enjoy being married!
Let’s start with why we need to court our spouse, and then look at 10 ways how to do it.
Canary, Stafford and Semic (2002) say that “liking is the degree to which a person admires his or her spouse.” It is made up of affection and respect and is the outcome of maintenance behaviors (like the ten things we’re going to give you!).
Think of maintenance behaviors as planting seeds in a garden. We need to be constantly planting these seeds in the soil of our marriage so that we can keep growing. If you stop planting, one day you’ll wake up and have nothing with which to nourish your marriage. At that point, you’re months from turning that around (just like seeds, maintenance behaviors take a while to germinate and bear fruit).
Think of your marriage as having a year-round growing season – we want to plant new seeds every week so that we have this constant harvest of love and romance.
Yes, this takes commitment, but it also creates commitment. When you have a great thing going, you want to keep at it! Researchers have found that if you do not engage continually in maintaining your marriage, things decline quickly.
Another incentive to keep at these maintenance behaviors comes from Wilcox & Dew (2012) who looked at the value of date nights as part of The National Marriage Project. They found that husbands and wives who engaged in couple time with their mates at least once a week were 3.5 times more likely to report being “very happy” in their marriages, compared to those who enjoyed less quality time with their spouse.
So, here are 10 ways to date your mate! These are not ideas pulled out of a hat but are pulled together from empirically validated research. This stuff really does work and will make a difference in your marriage. 1. Be Generous Generosity is a willingness to reflect on your spouse’s strengths and work around weaknesses to serve him or her (JMF, 2013). It’s not surprising that this comes up again – it was number 3 of the Top 5 Predictors of Marital Success. This is giving good things to one’s spouse freely and abundantly – not necessarily jewelry or expensive vacations, but things like service and affection. Notice and comment on your spouse’s good qualities and forgive your spouse. The same study cited above found that as generosity increased in marriages, so did marital satisfaction. Also, conflict and perceived divorce likelihood decreased.
- Be Sacrificial This flows from generosity, but it’s more than that – it’s the giving of benefits when a spouse is in need, and immediate reciprocation is not expected [Psychological Science (2010)].
My own daughter asked me today, “So, why do people do pre-marital counseling?”
She’s 13.
I’m glad she’s asking. You are likely wondering the same thing if you're reading this and so I’d like to make a case for it. Not just for my own benefit – I do offer pre-marital counseling/coaching – but for your sake especially.
You see, it does help. A lot.
Is Pre-Marital Counseling Worth It? One meta-analytic research review we looked into showed that the mean effect size for premarital programs was 0.80. In plain English, this means that the average person participating in a program was significantly better off afterwards than 70% of the people who did not participate. Okay, that's still not plain English...
In simpler terms, most people benefit greatly from Pre-Marital Counseling.
Marriage is a big thing. It’s not to be entered into lightly. Verlynda and I hope to build a house in the near future and part of what we will do is sit down and figure out exactly what it is going to take to complete the project. We’re doing that because we want to count the cost before we start and be sure of a positive outcome.
Pre-marital counseling is an opportunity to count the cost before you get into marriage and help secure a positive outcome.
It is a time to really take stock of what you’re going to be building for the rest of your life. You have the chance to learn about the resources you’ll need to finish what you are starting. You'll gather essential resources and information like communication skills, shared values, shared vision for your future, shared dreams, goals and so on.
Verlynda and I actually had very, very little pre-marital counseling. But I am so thankful for what we did have as I did some major learning about how to be the husband I needed to be. It would have been very painful for me (and more so for Verlynda!) to learn that by trial and error! What Should You Be Looking For in a Pre-Marital Coaching/Counseling Program? There are basically three varieties of programs:
Self-directed Therapist-directed Assessment based
One study we looked into compared these three and noted that the assessment based programs were the most effective both immediately following the program and 6 months later.
This is the approach I use. Rather than being purely something I create extemporaneously, I begin with an assessment to determine strength and growth areas for the couple and follow through with skills training leading from what is revealed from the assessment. We then go on to discuss what each couple feels is most relevant to creating a successful marriage. What Are The Benefits of Pre-Marital Counseling? There are plenty of good reasons. But here are four backed by research from a 2001 article in an academic journal called Family Relations.
First, pre-marital counseling slows couples down to foster deliberation. You will be compelled to stop and think seriously about your marriage. You will learn to become explicit about your expectations and beliefs. In fact, you may even discover dynamics that are unacknowledged or unnoticed that lead you to not marry at all.
On that note, we found another study that showed that 5-15% of pre-marital coaching resulted in a breakup. That might scare you off, but think about it. Would you rather have the pain of breaking up with your fiancée now? Or would it be easier to dissolve a marriage seven years in? We, therapists, believe that both the breakups and stronger marriages resulting from pre-marital counseling are success stories.
When you’re forced to deliberately clarify your expectations about marriage, you’re given the opportunity to discuss the most crucial (and possibly problematic) areas of your life together.
Second, pre-marital coaching or counseling sends a two-fold message to you as a couple:
That your marriage, as an institution, matters How your marriage turns out depends on your attitudes and actions
It’s critical to understand that successful marriages are not a ma...
I know what you’re thinking.
Why on earth would I want to support my spouse when we’re fighting?
Well, because you want to stay married, that’s why. That’s the “brutally-loving” truth!
But, there’s more.
It makes fighting productive. Yes. That’s right. I mean it. It actually makes the conflict helpful for your marriage.
Now, I could go down a rabbit trail about why fighting is good for your marriage but I want you to think about your beliefs about fighting and disagreeing instead.
We generally assume that as conflict increases in a marriage, the couple’s satisfaction with their marriage decreases. That’s a good assumption. It is usually correct. But focusing on stopping the conflict as a way to improve satisfaction just leads to avoidance.
That’s not going to work.
Research in a study presented by Cramer (2003) pointed out that if you focus on unconditional acceptance, understanding, and openness, as those increase, marriage satisfaction increases regardless of the quantity of conflict.
Pretty cool, hey?
This underlines the importance of focusing on the positive, of affirming what you want more of, and overall, the importance of building a healthy, thriving marriage.
When that is in place, it’s not about how much you fight anymore. I want you to worry more about the quality of your marriage (infusing the good) rather than the number of your disagreements.
In terms of positive things, you can bring to your next disagreement, let’s look at three that are critical. These skills will improve the quality of your marriage. Listen We talk a lot about listening because it is important!
Non-defensive listening is vital here. This is a skill that helps “partners to focus their attention on what the other person is saying and to attempt to really understand it. This skill reduces interruptions and the preoccupation with defending oneself and formulating retorts” (Gottman, 1994).
That’s a critical definition, and a useful one. You might want to even write that down.
Of course, to listen non-defensively is a challenge when we’re already ticked off at our spouse. But you’re doing this for your marriage, not just yourself, right?
To listen in this manner is going to require self-restraint. As in, restraining your impulse to dispute your spouse’s perceptions.
Don’t worry, the research confirms this is going to be a challenge: “Non-defensive listening requires significant self-control, particularly when there is an important disagreement and passions run high” Fowers, (2001).
Think of this as a skill. Like learning to ride a bike, you won’t get it right the first time. There’ll be bumps and scrapes but eventually, you will make this a habit.
And when you do, you’ll have discovered that you can keep your partner speaking while you exercise self-restraint.
This is a huge act of generosity! It is giving to your spouse the gift of attention and interest and it’s sending your spouse the signal that you believe he or she has something worthwhile to say.
So we can be generous or miserly with each other. But generosity, remember, is a top-five predictor of a successful marriage and so I’m challenging you to be generous by choosing to listen well. Validate Of course, if you are doing a good job of listening you’ll be well-positioned to validate your spouse.
Validation can be as simple as what we therapists call “listener backchannels”. As in, those simple verbal cues that tell the other person you’re following them. Things like, “mmhmm” and “yeah…” and nodding, eye contact and all that good stuff.
When you do this it doesn’t need to mean that you agree. But it is just saying to your spouse that you’re listening, you’re interested, and you may have your own point of view but you want to hear him or her out.
That’s the key point. I’m not asking you to agree with your spouse.
I am asking you to communicate that you understand her/his feelings and you acknowledge those feelings as legitimate for your spouse.
I read a comic strip once about pregnancy and childbirth that had the title “Help, my entertainment center is now a juice bar!"
While it struck my funny bone, there is so much truth in that statement.
We may think that adding our firstborn to the family will be all hunky-dory, fun and games, but the reality is it usually results in a DECREASE in marital quality. Navigating the relationship issues that transpire following the birth of a child can be tough!
If you’re a young parent reading this today, know that you guys are awesome! You may not feel awesome most days, but keep going. Props to you for navigating these tough times while bringing a new generation into the world.
So, what really goes on in our relationships and with our sexuality following the birth of a child?
Let’s talk about some realistic expectations, and how to create resiliency in your marriage to make this as positive an experience as possible. The ‘New’ Norm It is no surprise that a woman’s sexual desire and the frequency of intercourse in the early postpartum period is reduced. What surprised me was that breastfeeding was the cause.
Another thing that affects sexual intercourse during pregnancy and four months postpartum is the woman’s view of her changing roles. If the woman views her shift from the work role being primary to the mother role being primary in a positive light, there will be a greater frequency of sexual intercourse.
If you’re in this stage of life, be sure to discuss, as a couple, how you’re feeling about moving from being in the workforce to becoming a mother. Talk about what is positive, what you’re going to miss, and what you expect to be challenging.
Given that physical intimacy is reduced around the birth of a child, let us emphasize that having kids is NOT an ideal way to bring life or intimacy to your marriage. Rather than looking to baby to fulfill a need, bring your fullness to your baby. Use those first few years of marriage to focus on building a robust relationship, and from that healthy place, bring children into the family unit.
Another normal complication, which may be quite unpleasant, is Dyspareunia - pain during intercourse for women. The research says that 3 months after delivery 58% of women experienced dyspareunia, 39% experienced vaginal dryness, and 44% suffered a loss of sexual desire. Those are high numbers!
8-9 months later 26% still experienced dyspareunia, 22% had vaginal dryness, and 35% still suffered a loss of sexual desire. The scary part is only 20% of women discussed postnatal sexual problems with a physician.
You may think you are alone or unique, but you’re not! Talk to your doctor!
You can’t have pleasurable sex if you’re in pain while your husband’s penis is in your vagina. It is such a common issue and nothing to be ashamed about. Again, make sure you talk to your doctor.
I laughed at the results of the next study we looked at: they studied 768 first time parents and found that sexual desire is greater among fathers than mothers! Really… what a surprise!
Unfortunately, though, the tension between the sexual desires of the couple can become a focus of attention rather than the baby.
Add into the equation that men typically see sexuality as a way to intimacy, and women see intimacy as a way to sexuality, and it gets tricky. The husband can very quickly end up lonely and feeling emotional emptiness, but when Wife is experiencing pain and exhaustion, what are they to do?
One idea is to place more of an emphasis on sensuality over sexuality – hugging, kissing and caressing. Couples that compensate with this are better able to stay connected because it confirms each other and the affection they have for one another.
Another part for tired young moms to remember here is that you may have low desire because you are tired, but you can still be open to arousal. It’s the difference between going to bed wanting to do something versus going to bed willing to be open to something.
Do you find yourself always taking the blame for everything? I mean, not so much in the sense that your spouse won’t accept any, but that you just find that YOU blame yourself for everything? Even your spouse thinks you take too much responsibility for things?
Last week we discussed differentiation. Remember, differentiation is the process of learning to simultaneously separate from and connect with a loved one.
If you find yourself always taking the blame and never taking the risk of putting yourself out there and defending your position, you may be challenged with this idea of differentiation. Or, if you find yourself NEVER willing to take responsibility but you just state the facts, explain everything very rationally, and point out logically what is right or wrong, you’re also challenged with differentiation.
Now, we don’t want to be creating a bunch of fights where spouses think they need to stand up for their own rights fully, 100% of the time, and never back down… No, this is for those of us who are always ready to take the blame (you know who you are) or who are NEVER willing to take any blame (you know who you are too!).
There are two categories here, so let’s go through them. The Self-Blamer The Self-Blamer, in its extreme form, looks like an abused and battered woman who has experienced physical violence in an intimate relationship. These women report the highest levels of self-blame and lowest levels of perceived control, tending to say, “It’s all my fault, I’ll try to better next time.” (Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2000)
Reich et all (2014) found that the higher our self-blame, the lower our self-esteem.
If this is you, you’re probably blaming yourself for having low self-esteem – that’s what is so hard about this! Your recovery starts when you say “I deserve to be treated with respect! I am going to make a plan, and execute it, to take myself (and kids) to a safe place where we will be treated respectfully.” Listen to me. No one EVER deserves to be abused. You deserve love and respect! Don’t let anyone ever tell you differently! A more mild form of self-blame looks like the spouse who is always apologizing and taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong. This can happen in relatively happy marriages. What is NOT working here, however, is the differentiation piece.
Self-blame actually lowers anxiety in the short term as it reduces risk – you can control all of the accommodating that needs doing by doing it all yourself. Instead, you should be saying, “Well, this is my part and I own that, but I need you to do this part differently.” State your needs and wants, and give your spouse the opportunity to adjust rather than just take the blame yourself because it feels safer.
How can you do this? Try slicing it a little thinner! Look at the situation this way. When something currently happens, you’re taking the whole situation and putting it on your plate (basically saying, “This is my slab of meat, I am to blame”). What you need to do is slice it a little thinner and genuinely own what is your fault, but then put back on the other person what is theirs. (Take your slice of meat, but leave what is their fault/issue on the plate for them to deal with). If you’re in an abusive situation, this is going to create more abuse. So, your first step in slicing things a little thinner is realizing that your ‘part’ is accepting that you have accepted the role of an abused spouse and then choose to no longer be accepting of that. And get yourself to a safe place. Make a plan. Know what you’re going to do, and when, and how. Find out the resources available to you – there are a lot of them. Then execute the plan! For those that aren’t in this extreme situation, you’ll want to learn to pause and stop yourself from taking the easy way out. Own what is truly yours; where you have genuinely misbehaved, or misspoken or wronged your spouse, but leave the rest on the table.
In marriage, we need to strike a healthy balance between independence and dependence on each other. This is where we sort out the sticky stuff like needing you as my spouse versus just being needy - being an individual without taking away from a sense of ‘us’.
Differentiation is a key paradox of healthy marriage and is one of those concepts that when the skills are embodied takes a marriage from ordinary to extraordinary. It pushes the constant growth of the relationship and the individuals within it.
So, what is differentiation? It is the process of learning to simultaneously separate from and connect with a loved person.
This is different from a merger where there is an urgent, even desperate desire for one’s spouse to meet one’s needs. When the needs are not met, this is taken as abandonment or rejection.
Here’s an example of a merged relationship (Grau, Pastoral Psychology): A husband tells his wife that the house is dirty, that she never fixes dinner anymore, that she is uninterested in sex and has no libido. A wife tells her husband that he is a “slob,” that he drinks too much, that he is a dictator. The husband says that if she would change even a little, he would be happier and their marriage would be better. The wife wants the husband to change and when he doesn’t, she tries to convince him, perhaps employing emotional and physical coercion. They don’t realize that in requiring the other to change, they are giving their power away. This is a merger. It is a relationship that says “I need you to meet my needs”. Their happiness depends on the other’s behavior and it controls them.
A merger doesn’t work because the requirement that the spouse change sets up a hostile environment and the pressured spouse will distance, resist and retaliate in order to survive.
Going back to Grau’s story, let’s think about why they are doing this.
He is withdrawn and looks like an authoritarian or a drunk. He is acting unappealing (slob). She is disengaged too: no interest in sex makes coming home and being at home unappealing. She attacks a lot which maintains the distance. They are separating from each other but there are no words. When they talk, they are confrontational and not trying to connect. There’s a lot of blame and accusation. They are both anxious about the relationship, but when they talk about it and how they act around it all serves to keep the distance. They keep the distance because they’re anxious. So they’re in a crazy cycle.
Let’s go back to differentiation now. Remember, differentiation is the process of learning to simultaneously separate from and connect with a loved person.
It may be easiest to use an example to explain what I’m talking about… Not long ago, Caleb and I had a conversation about lingerie. He revealed to me some thoughts, expressed what he wanted, and how he wanted to feel. That’s him asking me for something that relates to him. In doing so, he was separating himself from me: stating ‘this is my position’. In that same moment – simultaneously – he was connecting with me by giving me a picture of his inside world. That is differentiation: simultaneously separating from and connecting to his beloved. Caleb was putting himself out there – he felt anxiety. But he didn’t withdraw and mull over or ruminate over thoughts like, “I wish she would do this or that”. He put himself out there and made himself vulnerable. That’s the first step! This is not about getting away from anxiety, but about using it instead of letting it control you. Our typical response is to be like the husband or wife in the merger example that withdraws or retaliates. “I had to self-soothe and self-comfort,” Caleb says, “and take the risk and put myself out there.” This is the hardest thing to do but in the end, he stated a desire that he had and left the ball in my court. His happiness did not depend on me fulfilling that desire, but he made himself vulnerable by stating something intimate that he wished for.
We live in a quick-fix society. Everything is easy, cheap and disposable. Somehow we’re trained to think about what we get OUT of things, rather than what we can build into them to make them better.
Sometimes marriage can seem complicated. Daily rituals are the little things that can combat the rough areas and make a difference in the day-to-day-living of a couple. They are easy and are sure to really boost your marital happiness.
We’re not talking about one-off try-this-when-you-get-home-today ideas, but things that you can weave into the daily fabric of your marriage. Be intentional about building daily rituals into your marriage and families to make them bastions of love and security. Make your marriage a safe harbor to return to daily!
First, let’s look at the “why”, and then we’ll give some suggestions for the “how”. Why are Rituals Even Necessary? Rituals in marriages and families have two parts: (1) behavior and (2) its meaning or symbolism. There is a very practical component (the habit, or behavior) and a symbolic component (meaning) that makeup part of your couple-identity.
We all have routines, but rituals are different – they have meaning. The meaning may never be stated or agreed on, but the meaning is still there. Other times it might be something explicitly discussed and agreed to.
A brief, personal example here: one of our daily rituals is that at night, we hold each other in bed. Almost always in the same position…It’s not sexual…We don’t sleep like this because we’d overheat…But it’s several minutes long and we pray together. That’s the behavior. The meaning of this is it’s one of our moments when we feel most together, it brings joy, and it’s a way that we ground ourselves after a crazy day because yes, even though we help other marriages, ours is not perfect! But this ritual just reassures us that no matter has happened, is going on, or is going to happen…we are together!
Some of the benefits of marriage rituals were identified in an article from the Journal of Family Psychology as follows:
Identity – they help define who you are as a couple Provides a sense of lovability Increases cohesion Provides stability during times of stress or transition Provides a sense of belonging, closeness and group membership Overall booster for psychological health and functioning.
Another study showed that families who were more invested in rituals experienced more positive relationship quality and closeness.
But sadly, in some marriages rituals are absent. Haugland & Storm (2005) found that there was a drastic increase in unpredictability when couples or families stopped practicing routines and rituals. The family cohesion was weakened (the sense of togetherness decreased) which led to the family not feeling as safe.
Maybe it’s the word ritual that makes it sound airy-fairy, but these meaningful habits actually have a huge impact on the happiness and satisfaction of your marriage. How Can I Add Rituals to my Marriage? You probably have some of your own daily rituals of connection, and that is awesome! Acknowledge those and then take it up a notch – add a few more to the routine. Here are ten ideas of Rituals of Daily Connection:
Morning hug or cuddle – start the day off well! Even if you get up at different times, or one leaves for work super early, make sure you connect, even briefly before you go your separate ways for the day. Touch Base around lunch – Whether it’s a text or a phone call, take the time to be in touch with your spouse and let them know you’re thinking about them. 5 for 5 – Spend the first five minutes at home within 5 feet of your spouse. It just gives those few moments of reconnection and lets your spouse know they’re the most important thing to you in your day. Coffee or Tea together – Pardon the personal reference, but this is one of the favorite times of my day; Caleb and I have breakfast and coffee after the girls get on the school bus.
There is a lot of discussions nowadays in the business world about work-life balance. Today I want to challenge and inspire you to think seriously about your work-marriage balance!
Materialism is the excessive desire to acquire and consume material goods. Think about the choices and values you place on material things (things you can buy) and how that affects your satisfaction with your marriage.
Not that wealth is bad, nor is it wrong to prosper. Owning and enjoying material things is not bad either. What we see from the research is that it is not so much the value OF things but the value we GIVE to things and wealth that influences our marital satisfaction.
We’re going to look at four things: how marriage makes you wealthier, how work impacts marriage, how materialism itself affects marital quality, and how starting a family sooner or later (as a financial/career decision) affects life and family satisfaction. Marriage Makes You Wealthier Zagorsky published his findings in the Journal of Sociology (2005) after conducting a study of individuals in their youth, then into their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s. He found:
Single people slowly increase their net worth over time Married people experience a 77% increase in net worth than single people On average, their wealth increases by 16% for each year of marriage. Divorced people: wealth starts to decrease 4 years before the divorce and they end up experiencing an average wealth drop of 77%
The message is NOT: Stay wealth – don’t get divorced! The message is, you have the opportunity to get married, go for it, and take care of your marriage because one of the usual blessings is an increased likelihood of growing your net worth.
Another thing, putting the heartache and really difficult consequences aside, it’s way cheaper to do counseling or coaching or marriage enrichment work early on and even when you feel like you don’t need it, than it is to go through a divorce. Be proactive about enriching and maintaining the quality of your marriage! Work Impacts Marriage Maume and Sebastian surveyed 372 couples (Journal of Family Economics, 2012).
They discovered that for men, working a fixed night schedule lowered marital quality compared to men who worked fixed days. Also, marriages suffered when work schedules limited the time they could spend with their spouses. We’re not condemning you if this is what you need to do. We have good friends that have done this, but it’s hard!
For women, it was a little different. Because of the expectations to get things done at home, outside-the-home-work was a disruption to family life, time for herself and time to engage with family members. This culminated in a negative marital effect if she was working rotating schedules, in particular.
If you’re feeling really stuck and feel you have no other options for work, then your task is to figure out ways you can make the best of it and compensate for this challenge.
Infidelity is something to keep in mind when in the workplace. A separate study showed that men with higher incomes are more prone to engage in infidelity. (Interestingly, for women, it’s the opposite.) Perhaps it’s because they spend more time in the workplace to create wealth, or perhaps only due to the fact that their professional and personal lives include more opportunity to engage in these illicit relationships. “Researchers have found that around one-half of participants who had cheated on their partner and who sought therapy (due to problems in their primary relationship) had met their extradyadic partner through their work”. We definitely need to be cautious about the impact that work can have on our marriages! Be aware of how decisions around work and career impact our marriage for better or for worse. Spending Affects Marital Quality In 2011, Carroll et all looked at how aligned couples were on how their money should be spent and how that influenced their marriage. The findings were really interesting:
Because of how sexuality is portrayed in media and how we are socialized to perceive it in our culture, I think there’s this perception that arousal is just something you flip the switch on to get things warmed up for sex. In reality though, what happens in the marriage bed starts much earlier, and much differently!
This week, we really want to challenge you to push the idea of intimacy out past the bedroom and to think about it as part of the fabric of your daily lives.
We have this simplistic idea that intimacy equals sex and sex equals intimacy. We need to move away from this to a broader definition of intimacy that includes a connection between the two spouses in marriage on every level: body, soul, and spirit (or physical, emotional, and spiritual).
In particular, look at the emotional and spiritual as being precursors or even prerequisites to the physical!
Did you know that “we are most emotionally invested in a relationship when we depend alone on that relationship for sexual intimacy” (Hill, 2002)? That commitment to sexual fidelity should cause us to try to nurture and deepen our emotional intimacy.
Intimacy-killers such as affairs, pornography and mommy porn (through books or movies like 50 Shades of Grey) rob marriages of emotional intimacy. Fidelity and loyalty are critical (marital commitment is one of the top 5 predictors of marital success), so make sure you continue to build them into your marriage. Remember, being close emotionally leads to being close physically!
There are a couple of interesting little tidbits in the research about this. 1 – Men are more likely than women to expect sexual behavior in the absence of emotional closeness and 2 – Women are more likely to agree to sex when her husband expresses value for her and provides nurturance and comfort to her.
These facts emphasize our point to husbands – Husband, touch your wife’s heart before you touch her body!
Emotional intimacy is more important as a segue to arousal for woman than it is for men. I don’t know if this is rooted in our DNA or if we’re just so socialized for it that it works out this way, but that’s how it is!
Another study we looked at couples in mid-life. Yes, it’s an older age group than most of you, but this is where you’re heading so it’s worth noting. The couples were asked the question, “What do you think of sex without love?”
The results came in for both men and women, that if their marriage relationship was strong on emotional pleasure, they were far more disapproving of sex without love. These more mature couples realized the overall value and meaning of emotional intimacy as part of their sexual intimacy.
The research also showed that the higher the emotional quality of the relationship, the greater the frequency with which the couple would have sex!
All this information just highlights the fact that intimacy is more than sex. It also highlights the fact that while media and popular thinking is selling cheap, instant gratification sex, what is more satisfying is the making love out of a relationship that has been lovemaking for a long time.
If you focus on emotional intimacy, you receive a wider spectrum of benefits that includes more sexual intimacy.
So, how do we do that?
Establish some basic rituals of emotional connection. An easy one is daily talking and sharing. Try to have some time, even if faced with the challenge of young children or conflicting schedules, when you can just share your days.
We use 5 for 5 - five minutes with five feet of each other within five minutes of getting home from work. We also have breakfast together after the kids get on the school bus. When we don’t do this, we start to feel like strangers and really miss it.
And before you start thinking that Caleb and I are unique somehow and have always had the perfect marriage – we haven’t. In fact, there have been times when I wasn’t sure if our marriage would make it. But we’ve worked at it, and made the time to talk,
What if you could focus on just five things to make sure that your marriage is a success?
Relationships can sometimes seem pretty complicated. For this reason, we took a step back to ask the question, “What are the core things that we MUST focus on to make sure we’re on the right track towards marital bliss?”
We found (through the research of the National Marriage Project and the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values) that the top five things to bring happiness to your marriage are: Number 1 – Above average sexual satisfaction The research says that “sexually satisfied wives enjoy a 39-percentage-point premium in the odds of being very happy in their marriages, and that sexually satisfied husbands enjoy a 38-percentage-point premium in marital happiness.”
From this we conclude that couples with a better sex life report to be happier in their marriage!
It’s normal for sexual activity to decline immediately following the birth of a child, but it’s important that couples rekindle and renew this part of their relationship as quickly as possible. (Keep a lookout for a great upcoming episode – “How to get it on when you really don’t feel like it” or something like that!)
Husbands, here’s a newsflash for you… “Woman are more likely to report that they are sexually satisfied when they report that they share housework with their husbands. What happens outside the bedroom seems to matter a great deal in predicting how happy husbands and wives are with what happens in the bedroom.”
The research also shows that men and women are more sexually satisfied in marriages “marked by high levels of generosity, commitment, religious faith, and couple-centered quality time.”
I always knew that sexual intimacy was more than just what happened in bed, but I didn’t realize that it was affected by so many areas of life!
Cultivate a great sex life – you’ll have a happier marriage! Number 2 – Above average commitment “The association between commitment and marital success is striking. Spouses who score above average in terms of commitment are at least 45 percentage points more likely to report being “very happy” in their marriages, and 29 percentage points less likely to be prone to divorce. In other words, above-average commitment more than triples the odds of marital happiness for husbands and wives and reduces their divorce proneness sixfold.”
Wow! This tells me that more commitment equals more happiness in marriage. It also shows that more commitment equals a significant drop in divorce risk.
How committed are you to your marriage? How are you building that commitment? And how are you communicating that commitment to your spouse?
Deepening your commitment so that it is above average is a top predictor of a very happy marriage. Number 3 – Above average generosity to your spouse First, let’s define generosity in the context of marriage. It is simply “the virtue of giving good things (we don’t mean jewelry) to one’s spouse freely and abundantly. It encompasses small acts of service (like making coffee for your spouse in the morning), the expression of affection, displays of respect and a willingness to “forgive him/her for mistakes and failings”.
Embrace a spirit of service – not entitlement, and genuinely look for ways to serve one another. Add to that frequent displays of affection (hugs…kisses…holding hands…smiles…winks) and being ready to forgive, and you have a winning combination!
Learning to serve each other generously in this way leads to a very happy marriage! Number 4 – Above average attitude towards raising children I found this part of the research interesting. “Fathers and mothers who spend lots of time with their children in activities such as playing, talking, or working on projects together also enjoy significantly higher levels of marital happiness and lower divorce proneness (and also enjoy more couple time with one another)."
Some research has indicated in the past that more family ti...
As I sit here, gazing at a picture of my handsome husband, I am asking myself the question, “Should I talk to him about it? It has been bugging me for a few days… Oh, I know! I’ll just shoot him a text message and hint at it – that’ll work out well!”
NOT!
I think the age-old question of “Should I bring it up with my spouse or just let it go?” needs some good wisdom thrown at it.
To start with, I want to quote Caleb who says, “Marriage is a crucible for character formation – but only if we’re willing to act as a catalyst of change for the benefit of our spouse.”
Our spouses see the ugly side of ourselves the most and the neat thing about marriage is they can point out the uglies (in a nice way, obviously!) in the secure bond of a loving relationship, and it gives us the chance to change and grow. If they never pointed anything out (were never our catalyst for change) we wouldn’t have that opportunity to improve!
This brings me to the topic of ideals. [Hear me out for a bit as I’m going in all different directions. I will pull it all together, really! :)]
Ideals… Idealism scares Caleb and I. We always thought that ideals were this level of perfectionism that we could never achieve. Then, all the research he looked at about ‘confronting or letting go’ centered on ideals!
We were thankful to learn though that the research also says not to have unrealistic high standards. In other words, don’t set your ideals so high that they are difficult or impossible to live up to. Ideals should be realistic and achievable standards.
So, what can we do to bring about change in our marriage, and not set ourselves up with unrealistic ideals? Here’s a hint, sitting back with your arms crossed and mouth shut and expecting your spouse to achieve your ideals doesn’t work… Here are two things to work on: all based on communication. 1. Quantity of Communication. This is simple. More is better.
The research shows that couples are happier with their marriage when they think their relationship matches their ideal standards. Sounds obvious enough!
Given that a marriage does not start with all our ideals aligned, how do we align those ideals and make the marriage more satisfying? Or, What if we get them aligned and then move into a different phase of life where things have to change, again?
That’s where quantity matters! Spouse’s ideals align best when they are communicating more about them. By talking about them, the ideals can align, and because of that, each spouse becomes more satisfied with their marriage.
One thing we hear a lot when talking to people that are struggling in their marriage is language around misalignment. “She’s just not interested in working on this part of our marriage,” or “We just can’t see eye to eye on this particular issue.”
Our answer to that is to communicate about it! Seriously, if you want to get your ideals lined up because you believe this leads to relationship satisfaction – talk about it. Talking allows you to influence each other’s viewpoints, which influences how you experience reality. The biggest influence on connecting ideals to satisfaction is communication. You have to be talking this stuff through! 2. How You Communicate Not only is the quantity important, but you also need to be strategic about HOW you communicate your ideals!
The first step is to do some thinking yourself! Be clear on your own ideals and ask yourself if they are realistic. Here is an example of an unrealistic ideal versus realistic:
Comparing your wife to models in magazines, or, worse yet, women in pornography, is NOT a realistic ideal. It’s VERY unhealthy and wrong, actually. Expecting your husband to match the ideals in your romance and harlequin novels is equally wrong.
It IS realistic to hold an ideal that BOTH of you try to bring a healthy – not perfect – body to your marriages, in so much as you are able to control. It IS realistic to expect both of you to act romantically, and get your sexy on with each other.
It’s Valentines Day this weekend! Happy Valentine’s Day!
We specialize in marriage and love so we’re supposed to be all enthused about Valentine’s, right!? So, why do we have mixed feelings about it all?
First, some history…
There is no firm historical record of how Valentine’s Day came to be, but there are a couple of commonly held possibilities.
Apparently, there was an ancient Fertility festival called Lupercalia which occurred on February 15th. This lovers’ holiday traces its roots to raucous annual Roman festivals where men stripped naked, grabbed goat- or dog-skin whips, and spanked young maidens in hopes of increasing their fertility.
Another source we found said that during the festival, young women would place their names in a large urn. The young men would draw a name from the urn and then be romantically linked with that young woman for the following year.
Either way, I’m thankful we’ve moved on to a more commercialized version of Valentine’s Day!
The Catholic church, however, says it has nothing to do with these ancient pagan rites. Rather, the day’s celebration stems from three possible St. Valentines.
The most probable of which was a young priest who was put to death for marrying young Christians against the orders of the Roman Emperor. Before being put to death on February 14th, he sent a letter to the jailor’s daughter – with whom he had become friends – and signed if “From your Valentine”.
Regardless of which Valentine the holiday is named after, in 469 A.D. Pope Gelasius changed the date of Lupercalia from the 15th of the month to the 14th, in order to distance it from the rituals of the Roman pagan love festival and connect it with St. Valentine.
The last alternative of the history of the Valentine story is also probable.
The Roman Emperor at the time, Claudius II, prohibited young men to marry because he believed that unmarried men made better soldiers. St. Valentine took pity on these young men and began to perform secret marriages so they could be with their lovers. Emperor Claudius became aware of what St. Valentine was doing and had him imprisoned.
Emperor Claudius attempted to convert Valentine to worship the Roman god, but St. Valentine refused and in return attempted to convert the Emperor to Christianity. Emperor Claudius did not respond well to this and sentenced Valentine to be killed. After his death, Valentine then became what is known as a “Patron Saint.” Some consider him the spiritual overseer of an annual festival in which young Romans would distribute cards of affection to those they wished to formally see. This festival was held each February 14.
Apparently, there are Valentine cards in museums worldwide that date back to 1415 and massed produced valentines began in the 1840s with the first “chocolate box” introduced by Richard Cadbury in 1868.
Back to today…
Here are some interesting statistics:
In 2014, the National Retail Federation estimated that US Consumers would spend $17.3 billion on the Valentines Day holiday! OVER $17 BILLION!!! Women purchase 85% of all Valentine’s 64% of men will buy flowers on Valentine’s Day.
This raises the interesting subject of expectations! What do we expect of each other? And what do others expect of us?
For us, we just see this as a commercial event. There is NO RESEARCH that says that the billions of dollars spent on Valentines in North America actually do anything to benefit marriages.
We don’t need it for our marriage, but we don’t want to Grinch your Valentine’s either. Some folks have a very warm, romantic tradition around Valentine’s – and that’s awesome!
What makes us start to grumble is what others expect of us. That’s where you have to have your own love languages and set boundaries on other’s expectations of you. And both be ok, together, on that!
Talk to your spouse about your expectations for this holiday. You might be ok with not doing anything, but if the girls at the office hear you don’t get anything,
In 2015, couples are saying that communication is their biggest struggle. Why, when we’ve never had so many ways to communicate and keep in touch as we do now, are people still struggling with this?
The research is somewhat ironic. Well, not the research itself, but the fact that the topic of marriage communication was studied, documented, tallied, hashed out, etc. back in the 1980s and ’90s. However, in 2015: couples still say this is their #1 area for improvement.
Why is that?
Let’s look to some research to help us. In 2010, Family Relations studied stress, communication and marriage quality in 345 couples. Their conclusion was that the level and quality of marital communication mediates the amount of effect that stress has on marital quality.
To make this simpler, think of stress as a downpour of rain, and communication as the umbrella. The bigger and the higher quality (ie. more waterproof) the umbrella, the better the couple fairs. The umbrella mediates the impact of the rain on the couple just as communication mediates the impact of stress on a couple.
Our communication umbrella needs to include quality and quantity. The communication technology we have in 2015 improves the quantity of all communication sources (for example, you are exposed to way more content of way more lives via Facebook) but not the quantity from your spouse. Not the quality either: if anything the quality of communication is lower due to greater distraction!
Another fascinating study looked at couples having a dinnertime conversation. After dinner, the researchers then had a separate 15-minute discussion regarding a conflict in their marriage. Gottman and Drive (2004) found that the enthusiastic response of the husband to his wife in the dinnertime conversations influenced her affection towards him during conflict. And vice versa: her dinnertime enthusiastic responses drove his affection during conflict.
I love this as I am a huge advocate of enthusiasm!!! – Verlynda
The point of the research is that every day we have positive interactions we are building this tremendous line of credit, so that when ugly comes out and we’re fighting it’s going to go way better if that line of credit is ready to go than if it is depleted.
To link that back to our umbrella analogy where communication regulates the impact of stress on marriage quality, we really see that stuff as simple as dinnertime conversation is having a measurable, real impact on our times of conflict.
What is your dinnertime like? Turn the TV off, put the cell phones somewhere so you won’t hear every ding, and practice the art of being fully present.
This begs the question though, “What happens when we are not fully engaged?” It’s easy to think that ‘not enough’ of a good thing just means it won’t be as great.
Well, the research debunks that idea. Wagner (Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2005) looked at 53 married couples and the impact of one spouse not staying fully present during a discussion. He found that the effect of not engaging properly actually disconfirmed the other spouse’s identity!
In other words, it left the other spouse feeling like they were not understood. Not being understood leads to thoughts that my position is not verified, and actually leads to disconfirming my identity. To put it simpler, it’s saying that if you ignore me, you’re sending a signal that says the part of me I really want you to see is not worth seeing.
Ouch!
A lot of pain comes from not being fully engaged in conversations. It’s not like you forgot to add enough salt but it still tastes OK; lack of engagement is acidic and corrosive to the relationship because it’s undermining your spouse’s sense of identity.
If you’re not present and engaged with your spouse when communicating, you’re actually hurting him or her.
If communicating is important to you, make sure you check out our Talk To Me 101 e-Course. It is a communication course for smart couples.
What does faithfulness, or fidelity, mean in your marriage? What does it look like? Are your boundaries strong enough to protect your marriage from an affair?
What got us started down this road of thinking is the observation that you can be in a committed marriage and never have sex outside that marriage for forty years, but still be giving members of the opposite sex a lust filled looking over.
This begs the question about what loyalty and fidelity mean in a marriage. If you proudly say “I am faithful to my wife… but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying the scenery”, is that really fidelity?
Let’s assume for a moment that we’re all clear that the extremes of unfaithfulness are wrong: we’re not talking about adultery here, or pornography use, or any act of physical intimacy, or even an emotional affair with a person you’re not married to.
However, disloyalty can go in all sorts of directions, and show up in many different ways:
A wife makes a comment about some famous Hollywood actor being ‘eye-candy’? There is no hope of an actual act of infidelity occurring there, so is it OK? A husband rubber-necks as he drives through town on a warm summer day. Is it OK for him to check out other women? A spouse says, “Why can’t you look like that?” (Ouch…) Perhaps it’s just the joking and camaraderie that kind of fringes toward mild flirting – even in a group setting. Is this allowable?
While some definitions of fidelity are really clear (like having sex), others are very much going to be defined by each couple. In The Journal of Marriage and Family Therapy (JMFT), Blow reported that a breach of trust has more to do with the perspectives and beliefs of the individuals within the relationship than any overarching norms. In other words, the couple creates their own standards. [Again, we’re holding this up in the assumption that we’ve already established that there are objective, moral boundaries that must not be crossed. Like, no sex outside of marriage. We are NOT promoting ‘open’ marriage; we promote the Biblical values of faithful marriage.] For example, a wife or husband on a business trip sits down on the airplane beside an attractive, friendly member of the opposite sex. For one couple, the expectation might be to limit the interaction to a friendly greeting and then plug in the headphones or read a book. They’re comfortable with that boundary.
For another couple, it may be totally OK to have an engaging conversation and share pictures of your spouse and children. No flirting, just friendly and proper, and then that spouse relates the conversation when he/she gets home to the other spouse. Both spouses in that marriage are comfortable with that boundary.
Neither scenario is morally wrong. Does the second approach carry a higher element of risk? Yes, probably! This is where couples need to discuss what they consider reasonable and what they can tolerate in their marriage.
There is a subjective element to fidelity. Scheinkman and Wenecke in the Family Process also support this subjective aspect.
Nevertheless, here’s what’s so important to know. It IS a fact that there is a slippery slope from smaller disloyal thoughts and behaviours towards an affair.
The Clinical Psychology Science Practice (2005) pointed out that the decision-making process before extra-marital involvement consists of smaller decisions and steps. Like, having coffee with an opposite-sex coworker…then spending more time with them…then engaging in more intimate conversation.
This is where we start to get some practical checkpoints for early warnings of infidelity. Following are two items you need to watch for in order to be proactively working against affairs in your marriage.
- Pros VS Cons
Decisions to engage in extramarital involvement are conscious decisions that involve weighing potential costs and potential benefits. Ask yourself, am I doing a cost/benefit analysis about the behaviours or thoughts I am engaging in? If so,
Ahhh...the science of love.
It’s pretty cool that something as amorphous as love can be studied. And even cooler when you find research that identifies the daily habits that catalyze the deepening of love. Withdrawer or Pursuer? Some of the most helpful research on love falls under what is known as Attachment Theory. It’s a superb framework for understanding the emotional bond of family and marriage relationships.
In the context of marriage, the theory provides for the idea that a spouse will default to a withdrawing or pursuing role. Most often, each spouse will compliment each other: one typically pursues and the other typically withdraws.
A withdrawer tends to be more turned inwards and less likely to voice wants and needs and also finds it more difficult to self-disclose.
A pursuer, on the other hand, is more characterized by blaming. He or she may be more volatile and outspoken in conflict and tends to attack when hurt rather than pull back and shut down.
In our marriage, I tend to be the withdrawer and Verlynda the pursuer. That’s actually the most common format: husband withdraws, wife pursues.
But is that normal?
In this episode, I posed a question to Verlynda: in the relationship between Jesus Christ and the church, which one is usually pursuing and which one is usually withdrawing?
Right. Christ is the pursuer. Here’s the connection: in Ephesians 5 we are given a model for marriage where husbands are told to love their wives as Christ loved the church.
God calls husbands to be the pursuers.
But we’ve been socialized in North American culture to lay the responsibility for relationships at the feet of the wife and mother in our families. In my opinion, as males, we have abdicated one of our critical roles.
So, how do we fix that? Four Habits to Deepen Your Love Husbands: I’m calling you to lead in this. Here are four areas in which we can develop healthy habits that deepen our love for one another. Hear me when I say this: these are all doable. This is not out of your reach!
Everyday Talking and Sharing
This comes from research our team found in the Journal of Marriage and Family Therapy.
You can create daily companionship very easily by having conversations about personal matters. This is a simple tool that creates powerful leverage for building the love bond between you and your spouse.
Just share things like your activities for the day, plans for tomorrow or the weekend. Get face to face, make eye contact, put your cell phone down and share. Listening to understand is a key part of this..
Everyday interaction is easy, straightforward and it’s important.
Recognize Your Role and Compensate
If you’re a withdrawer, push yourself to voice your wants and needs.
Self-disclose. I know you want to – I feel the desire and the resistance myself. But the more you share and open up, the deeper the intimacy goes.
If you’re the pursuer, your job is to soften your responses and respond more positively to wants, needs, and disclosures from your spouse. Resist defaulting to a blaming stance and do what you need to do to make the connection safer.
When both work together on this through the challenges of daily life, stronger attachment (i.e., deeper love) is the result.
Healthy Physical Intimacy
Think about how you bring yourself to the physical intimacy in your marriage. Are you relaxed and confident? Or are you using sex to gain reassurance or avoid rejection?
Do you communicate your needs openly and respond to your spouse’s equally? Or are you demanding and only focused on your own pleasure?
People: this is called “making love” for a reason. Closeness should be both the cause and effect of sex. Go for that deep emotional connection that comes when you lose yourself in your spouse.
Spiritual Intimacy
This is taking your emotional connection into another realm altogether. But a vital one for deepening the love in our marriages (Harris & Marshall, 2008).
Pray together.
One of the things we want to get you thinking about at the very start of this year is what you are going to do, with deliberate purpose, to enrich your marriage this year.
Marriage is an easy thing to take for granted.
Think for a moment about the things you value most. What do you do with those things? You get insurance for them! There is every kind of insurance out there which most of us have on our valuable possessions, like life insurance, medical insurance, disability insurance, house insurance, car insurance, business liability insurance, even extended warranties are a form of insurance.
We spend thousands of dollars per year on insurance. Yet we balk at a $30 expense or even a $300 weekend of marriage enrichment. Does that really make sense?
Think practically for a moment. The cost of divorce drops your net worth by at least 50%, plus it’s like $30,000-90,000 to deal with all of the actual fallout with lawyer fees, etc. Never mind the emotional cost or cost to our children, family, and friends.
Our marriages are super valuable, but isn’t it ironic, and really kind of foolish, that we spend money on insuring other valuable things in our lives, but not our marriages.
We want to encourage you in 2015 to insure your marriage by engaging in some sort of marriage enrichment. Here’s why:
Bray & Jouriles (1995) found that should difficulties arise, couples responded better to marriage counselling when they had increased problem solving and communication skills, were less distressed at the onset of counselling, and were more emotionally engaged with each other.
McAllister, Duncan & Hawkins (2012) found that marriage enrichment worked on those very skills listed above: communication and relationship quality (emotional engagement and less distress). The point being that marriage enrichment programs address key areas that lead to better outcomes should the need for counselling arise.
As we spoke about in our series on fighting, repair after the fight is much more successful if positive mojo had been inputted into the marriage long before the fight occurred!
Every couple hits rough spots. At the very least, marriage enrichment programs help you get through those tough times, but should you both decide you need extra help, they also create an incredible advantage for going the extra mile with counselling.
Our CHALLENGE for you this year is to do something deliberate to enrich your marriage. Even if you can just save up $30 a month and aim for a weekend away at the end of the year, you’re taking that first step. If you can’t do that – you can get a good book from the library for free. Read it, then discuss it together.
We’ve all heard the objection, “Well, you only need that if you've messed up.” Not so, says the research! Research by Doss, Rhoades, Stanley, Markman & Johnson (2009) showed that more distressed couples and those at risk for divorce were less likely to attend marriage enrichment programs than couples that were in more healthy relationships.
Interesting that the couples that made it a priority to enrich their marriages were less distressed and at less risk for divorce.
So, what kinds of resources are out there? There are really three approaches:
Self-directed: You can do this at home, at your own pace with no professional involvement. Books and online programs are a good example of self-directed enrichment. Traditional: This is done in a classroom or group setting. It usually requires more time commitment and more money. Blended: A combination of self-directed and traditional. This could entail a workbook plus a group setting, or online eCourse plus coaching or counselling.
The research mentioned above (McAllister, Duncan & Hawkins) shows that self-directed is better than nothing and has many benefits. Traditional is the most popular and is better than self-directed, and the Blended method is the most effective.
The Internet really shines here because you can do a blended approach online with ...
Here’s a fresh thought for fixing or just strengthening your marriage this year: try improving your sleep quality. Really? Yes, really. In this episode of our marriage podcast, we interview Shawn Stevens. He is a best-selling author and the creator of the Model Health Show, currently the #1 Nutrition and Fitness podcast in the world on iTunes. [youtube id="zAM6iPk53m8"]
Watch the video for the full interview. I invited Shawn for an interview because I wanted him to help us understand how we can take care of our marriages by taking care of our sleep. As Shawn says at the start, “When you’re tired, your best friend can look like your worst enemy!” The Case For Sleep In the interview, we discuss various research articles that identify the impact of reduced sleep. The bottom line is, when you don’t get enough sleep, you limit your brain’s ability to help you relate to others. Sleep is the only state we experience that helps to rebuild our bodies and minds. Yet, it’s often the first thing we reduce when we begin to feel overloaded. Ironically, we reduce one part of our daily lives we need the most. Reduced sleep affects men and women different. For men, poor sleep predicts more negative ratings of spousal interactions the next day. For women, negative daytime interactions take away from sleep that night. You can imagine how quickly a destructive cycle can form from this interaction. Clearly, there is a well-established link between relationship quality and sleep quality. Sleep and Stress Sleep is also an important part of stress regulation. Marriage is a great source of stress relief but Shawn identifies how critical sleep is as part of managing stress. But the challenge is that stress makes for poor sleep and poor sleep makes for more feelings of stress. How does a person break out of this cycle? Strategies for Improving Sleep Quality One of the critical take-home lessons from this interview is the importance of exercising in the morning. This has a huge impact on the amount of time spent in the deepest (and most restorative) stage of sleep. Exercising at night, or late in the evening, is counterproductive to being healthy. You might be exercising, but you’re eroding the restorative potential of your sleep. Another critical take away is to observe a caffeine curfew. Caffeine has a half-life of about eight hours (depending on your metabolism). Consequently, Shawn’s recommendation is that there be no caffeine intake after 2 PM in the afternoon. Intake after that time is going to impact your body’s ability to get the quality of sleep it needs. Shawn also notes the importance of moderating body temperature. Running our house too warm, especially at nights in the bedroom, takes away from sleep quality. The research recommends running one’s bedroom temperature between 60 to 68 F (16 to 20 C) is ideal. There’s a side-benefit to a cooler room: more cuddling! That can’t but help the marriage too, right? Finally, we discuss the impact of sexuality on our sleep quality. The body releases a wonderful cocktail of hormones following orgasm with one’s spouse. Those hormones promote deeper and more restful sleep as well as reducing the impact of stress on our bodies. More from Shawn Stevenson Be sure to check out Shawn’s website, and podcast to learn more about how you can improve your health and fitness. As well, be sure to pick up a copy of Shawn’s book, Sleep Smarter: 21 Proven Tips to Sleep Your Way To a Better Body, Better Health and Bigger Success. I have read his book and highly recommend it. It is very digestible, a great read, and really takes you through many actionable ways that you can start improving your sleep tonight.
Sometimes after a long day, you just want to climb in bed and go to sleep… but your spouse has other ideas!
Differences in sexual desire are very normal. Usually, there is one high desire and one low desire spouse in a marriage – sometimes desires are equal, but not very often. Normally, the husband is a high desire and the wife low desire, but there is nothing wrong if it’s the other way around!
We want you to be aware of how these differences in desire can affect your marriage.
On a side note before we start; we are making the assumption that the difference in desire is NOT due to one or both spouses engaging in sexual activity outside of marriage, whether that’s masturbating to porn, or having an affair, and so on. Those are issues that need to be dealt with, but outside the scope of today’s post. Gender Matters Research indicates that men generally want sex more often than women and that they rate their own sex drive higher than women rate theirs. On an interesting note, men and women respond to initiations equally. The man just feels rejected more often because he initiates more. So some of the difference between genders is simply about perception.
Byers and Heinlein (1989), who performed the research above, also found that individuals with greater sexual satisfaction responded more positively to initiations. In other words, having higher quality sex leads to greater desire and arousability.
Here are five points that we want you to consider with regards to any differences in sexual desire in your marriage: 1. How is the quality of your relationship? The amount of emotional intimacy going on in your relationship is a critical component, especially for the low desire spouse, as physical intimacy is an extension of emotional intimacy. Are you really connecting at that “heart” level?
Another thing we need to distinguish between is desire and arousability. Just because you don’t initiate a lot doesn’t mean you are not interested in sex. The ability to be fully sexually engaged can be just as strong in both spouses. The low desire spouse needs to allow himself or herself to be aroused and the higher desire spouse needs to realize that a rejection is not a personal slight.
A person may want sex because they are feeling close, but the inverse is also true. They can want to be close by having sex. As long as this “want” is coming from a place of fullness (think, overflow of the heart) rather than a place of neediness (to calm anxiety about the relationship), it is a healthy thing. 2. How is the quality of your sex? Good sex leads to more sex. Are you sexually competent and skillful? Some of us were raised in a faith background that continually told us, “sex is bad”. Then we get married, and it’s hard to switch into “sex is good” mode!
We need to develop sexual competence – male and female! Have you had a real orgasm? What does it look like? How do you know if you’ve had one? It’s easier with men, but what does it take to bring her to orgasm?
There are good Christian resources out there – check out The Marriage Bed for help in this regard. This is a good, clean website that can help you develop greater sexual competence.
Make sure your sex is not a goal-oriented event. His or her release is not the goal – closeness and intimacy is! Neither spouse should feel used.
How you speak of your sex is also important. Don’t be critical of your spouse or your sex before, during or after the event.
What do you think about sex? Do you believe it is good? Has one spouse been abused or suffered sexual trauma? All these beliefs affect the quality of our sex.
And the last thing to think about with regards to the quality of sex is your beliefs about your own sexiness. In a Christian marriage done right, the only place you are sexy and seductive is within your marriage. We need to learn to allow ourselves to see ourselves as sexy in that context. 3. How is your health? Self-care is so important.
Christmas is supposed to be a time of joy and cheer with everybody bubbling over with joy. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it just plain hurts. It’s the time of year when there is so much stress and tension. Maybe you’re alone this year, and there is a lot of grief and pain involved. No matter what we’re going through, God has a story of redemption for our lives.
Let’s start with the Christmas Story from Matthew 1:18-25 Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.
But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us).
When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus. Let’s sympathize with Joseph for a few minutes here. He was engaged to be married to Mary, whom he thought was a virgin. Instead, he finds out she is pregnant and he knows the baby is not his.
What would you have done? What do you do when your spouse lets you down?
I think our natural inclination and the first response is like his: walk away. He made that decision (resolved) but then thought it over. That’s where God steps in and says “Do not fear to take Mary as your wife.”
The whole story of redemption begins with redemption in the story of Joseph and Mary’s marriage.
I don’t know what you’ve gone through this year in your marriage. Maybe your marriage is awesome and part of why it’s awesome is because you do things to enrich it like listening to marriage podcasts. On the other hand, maybe 2014 will be a year that you remember where some really hard things happened in your marriage.
We just finished a four-part series on fighting – fighting sucks. It’s painful. Sometimes it’s prompted by disappointment, like the disappointment Joseph felt when he initially found out Mary was pregnant. Some of those disappointments can be severe.
I want to encourage all of us – because we all let our spouse down, and get let down by our spouses – to look for the story of redemption that God is writing into our lives. God is calling us to be leading characters in that story. It’s his story, but it’s our role to join in and engage rather than to walk away, push back or abandon the story entirely.
There are some that are reading this, and this Christmas is especially painful for you because you are ready to engage in that story of redemption but your spouse isn’t. In fact, you may be facing your very first Christmas alone.
Our hearts go out to you. That’s hard. It’s sad, and we know it must be a very lonely experience.
But that’s where I want you to be encouraged! Step back from the story of redemption you wish was being written into the larger story of redemption that is always being written in and through the power of Jesus Christ.
Our little kingdoms can be in chaos. But God’s big kingdom is always ruled by a benevolent, loving God who was willing to go through his own loss, grief, and sorrow in the giving of His Son to this world so that we could take him, crucify him, and put him away. Right, when that story seemed like it was no longer being written, the angels that appear here to Joseph appear again to another two Mary’s in Matthew 28 – it’s an angel of resurrection.
Listen, I don’t know how your story is going to be written,
After a fight, you basically have four options: you can exit the relationship, you can be patient and loyal by waiting for your spouse to change, you can neglect your spouse, or you can repair. (Branau-Browna & Ragsdale, 2008)
We’ve discussed fighting in the last few topics: why fighting for your marriage is good, different fighting styles couples use, and basic ground rules for use in a fight. This last topic in our series, about how to repair after a fight, is definitely the most important of these four topics!
Really, thinking that the repair comes after the fight isn’t really accurate. To set your marriage up for success, repair also needs to come before and during a fight! Before Start with way before! Stafford and Canary (1991) list five factors that gauge the quality of a relationship and that you want to make sure are in your marriage long before a disagreement occurs.
Positivity – create a positive atmosphere for communication. Openness – practice the habit of being open and honest with each other. Don’t put up walls. Assurances – use statements designed to reassure your spouse of the well-being of the relationship (like “I’ll love you forever”, “I will never leave you”). Task Sharing – share the daily work-related for a family and home. Support Network – involve family and friends in the relationship (not someone you’ll go complaining to your spouse about, but someone who will support and help you both through whatever comes)
We want to challenge you to be strategic on the long term, visionary sort of basis! Build these qualities into your marriage and set yourself up for success before a conflict is even on the table.
As another researcher says, “the quality of the friendship between husband and wife” predicts whether repair attempts will work. Foster that friendship multiple times daily! During In 2010, Driver et al found that “all couples attempt to repair during conflict.” It’s a natural thing to do, but what we need to learn is to initiate repairs sooner and more often, and recognize and accept when our spouse is offering them!
During a fight, down-regulate your negative emotion or try to dial down how upset you are! This does not mean you may not be upset; you just need to contain it for a reasonable amount of time. When you are stuck in negativity or dish it right back when you receive it from your spouse, you get into the zone where relationship damage occurs.
Bloch, Haase and Leveson (2014) found that down-regulating was directly correlated to marital satisfaction over the long term. They reported that when you’re in a place of prolonged negativity and high emotionality you can’t understand each other, you can’t respond well to your spouse’s repair efforts and you are not going to get to collaborative problem-solving.
Try to calm yourself down when you’re feeling flooded with emotions and know that you’re getting negative. To do this, stop and take a few deep breaths - in through your nose, out through your mouth. To ground yourself back to reality, try running your hands down the side of your pant leg, or along the arm of your chair. Pay close attention to the feel of the fabric under your fingertips.
These actions will remove you far enough from the overwhelming emotions so that you can think more clearly.
To attempt repair during the conflict, try some of the following tips:
Take a break (“I need some time to calm down”) Use humor when appropriate (very powerful) Reaffirm the security of the relationship (verbally or physically [reach out]) Validate your spouse’s position (You might be right) Offer a compliment
Remember, if you don’t have the previous mojo of positivity, there may be a backlash against repair attempts during a fight. Repairing before the fight is so important! After Apologizing, offering forgiveness, reconciling with each other and showing affection are a few things you can do to “make up” after a conflict.
But really,
Most of us have the wrong idea about conflict in marriage.
We fear the conflict could lead to the disintegration of our marriage.
That’s a reasonable fear, in many ways. But we paint with too broad a brush. You see, it’s not the conflict itself that puts the marriage at risk but rather the behaviours within the conflict.
If you’re just jumping into this series, this episode and show notes are the third in a series of 4 on fighting in marriage. In the first show, we talked about why fighting is good for your marriage. Then we went over fighting styles in the second episode: some work and some do not! You want to be sure to have a style that isn’t destroying your marriage.
In today’s episode, we’re interested in the actual behaviors that we engage in while we fight because those can take a marriage down over time too. Long Term Ground Rules for Fighting We need to have a long view of marriage. Conflict is inevitable and so it is going to come again and again. But did you know that there are behaviors you can engage in that will strangle your affection and love over time? They are:
Exploding and getting out of control Just giving in to your spouse on the issue – every time Withdrawing during conflict: shutting down and refusing to talk
These three behaviors were identified by Hanzal and Segrin (2009) as being particularly dysfunctional over the long term. They will wear down your spouse, leaving him or her less and less able to deal with them over time.
Wives are particularly sensitive to this.
You see, husbands react more to in-the-moment behaviors. They get stressed but then they calm down.
Wives in conflict develop a stress load that just builds and builds. They carry their marital conflict history with them and then begin to get charged up more quickly facing future discussions.
So being explosive, or just caving in every time, or withdrawing are all ways to alienate your spouse. Why? Because there is no actual resolution to the issue that prompted the conflict.
The long term ground rules that you and your spouse agree on should include a commitment to keeping one’s self under control during conflict as well as being dedicated to seeing an issue through to resolution. Behave Yourself! There are three categories of behavior that occur during fighting, and I came across an article from the Journal of Marriage & Family (October 2010) that explained them nicely:
Destructive: include overtly negative reactions to marital problems such as yelling, insults, criticism, belligerence, and contempt. Constructive: involve overtly positive reactions such as saying nice things, calmly discussing the problem and actively listening. Withdrawal: entail disengaging from the conflict or person and may include things like leaving the situation entirely or just checking out by keeping quiet.
On the positive side, constructive behaviors actually lead to spouses feeling better and more satisfied with the marriage.
On the other hand, destructive behaviors in both newlyweds and longer married couples predicted divorce up to seven years later. “Predicted” is a keyword there: it means that an increased presence of the destructive behaviors showed a higher probability of divorce. Withdrawal behaviors were no better (research from Gottman and colleagues).
Here’s the takeaway: marital conflict, or fighting, is not the problem. Bad behavior while fighting is. The Bottom Line on Fighting There’s probably nobody alive today who has studied marital conflict more than Dr. John Gottman. He summarizes all his extensive research on successful and unsuccessful marriages in one simple sentence: ”Skills based on gentleness work best to produce happy and lasting relationships”. Simple enough? In the words of wise King Solomon, “A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”
Whether you take thousands of hours of research or a proverb written over 3,000 years ago you have the same truth.
“How couples argue and disagree about issues appears to be more consequential to the success of marriage than what they argue about or how often they experience conflicts.”
To reword the above quote taken from an article by Hanzal and Segrin in the Journal of Family Communication, you could simply say “how we fight has far more influence on the future of our marriage, than what we fight about”.
Therefore, our fighting style, or how we fight, really matters.
Before I get into the different styles of fighting, we need to be aware that gender differences make a big difference in our fights. In fact, a husband and a wife will experience the same fight differently. Not just because they have different perspectives, but because they are different genders.
You might not be a typical couple, and that’s not necessarily a problem, but the following things, about how most couples operate are good to keep in mind.
Women tend to be more negative in conflict and use confrontational behaviors that say “this is all about me”, rather than the marriage. The behaviors include being demanding, hostile, threatening, insulting and insisting that all the change should come from their husband.
But to stereotype men for a moment… Men are more likely to avoid. They get scared of the big emotions, so feel safer avoiding them altogether.
Another thing for men to keep in mind is that the less influence a woman feels she has in her marriage, the bigger the artillery she has to use to gain influence, so the more confrontational she will be.
Husbands, if you want a happier wife, receive her influence!
Remember, both husband and wife have the same end goal of trying to save the marriage, but they come at it from two completely different angles. Anger One thing that surprised me when Caleb and I were discussing the fighting in marriage, was that an angry wife has a far greater negative impact on marital satisfaction than an equally angry husband. The Proverb that says ”It is better to live in a desert land than with a quarrelsome and fretful woman” apparently is very true!
Wives, we need to take our anger seriously! It not only lowers our marriage satisfaction but our husband’s as well.
The angrier we become (this goes for both husbands and wives but I’m specifically thinking of woman), the more tempted we are to use nasty behavior such as demand, withdrawal, contempt, and criticism; all of which are particularly corrosive to marital well-being. Styles So now that we know that our fighting style really matters and that each gender comes at a fight a different way, let’s look at some of the different styles of fighting in marriage.
This model of fighting styles is taken from Dr. Gottman’s study in 1993. The first three are functional and work fine. The last two are considered unstable. 1. Avoiders Avoiders don’t think they are avoiders but don’t have any specific strategies for resolving conflict. They may wait stuff out or even talk stuff out, but never really go deep with each other. They kind of state their points, reaffirm their common ground and move on after coming up with some ambiguous solution. The challenge with an avoider’s marriage over the long term is that you can end up distant and lonely. 2. Volatiles Volatiles come straight at each other. They disagree and try to persuade each other. They produce a lot of drama: both positive and negative. They value arguing and really work hard at convincing each other. These folks can bicker pretty good but passionate love-making with likely follow. 3. Validators Validators tend to walk the middle line. There is conflict but there's ease and calm too and each spouse is trying to validate the other. This could look like clear empathy or a lot of “Mm hmm’s”. If you see this couple in conflict, you get the idea that they are both working together on a problem. This is a calmer approach to marriage, and it sounds rosy (and is!) but the romance can dissipate and the marriage can end up as a close fr...
Fighting is something I am passionate about. Probably because I was so bad at it when we first got married…
I would get mad and come across as hostile, crying and flinging words that I didn’t always even mean.
Caleb would try to apologize, calm me down and say whatever it took to get himself out of the situation.
And what did the fighting accomplish? Nothing! The issues never got resolved.
Enter Caleb’s grad school where he learned how to teach others to fight. Thankfully, he taught himself and his wife a few skills too, and our fights look much different today.
In fact, we can even vocalize the hard truth that needs to be stated without the other spouse getting hurt.
I love the fact that we can actually resolve issues now – get them dealt with and out of the way, rather than have them resurface time and time again.
Caleb and I are firm believers that fighting is indeed good for your marriage! But, something that we need to make clear from the start is that the fighting that we’re talking about that actually deepens intimacy in romantic relationships is ‘well-handled’ conflict. ‘Poorly-handled’ conflict, on the other hand, has negative implications for the relationship.
First, let’s rule out the bad stuff that is not good for your marriage. This includes hostility, anger, physical or verbal aggression, threat, and personal insult, yelling, insults, criticism, belligerence, and contempt. These are not acceptable and do not resolve anything in marriage. If used, they may shut the argument down for a short time, but the issues have not been dealt with and will definitely arise again in the future.
However, we’re not here to discuss the negative so much as the positive aspect of fighting. The following facts about why fighting is good for your marriage are summarized from the research of Gottman, Satir, Siegert and Stamp.
The goods on fighting:
1: It helps you to learn about each other.
2: It builds cohesion and commitment.
3: Dealing with stuff is better than ignoring stuff.
4: It is a catalyst for personal growth when you’re forced to confront your own humanity.
5: It’s a catalyst for spiritual growth. You have to enact the gospel in your life so faced with sin and brokenness; we have to deal with grace, forgiveness, redemption, reconciliation, mercy, and altruism.
In the next three episodes in our mini-series about fighting, we’ll describe different fighting styles, some ground rules in handling conflict well, and how to repair after a fight.
For now, know that if you have conflict in your marriage, you are normal!
We always seem to want to know though, “How normal are we? Do other couples fight about the same things that we do?” Well, here’s a list for you from Dr. Gottman. He says that couples fight most about communication, finances, children, sex, housework, jealousy, and in-laws. Sound familiar?
To end, I want to give you a tip that you can start today, that will build good mojo into your marriage and help it survive the fights that do come up. It can be summed up with the words turn toward your spouse. Turn toward each other for emotional connection. Do things that deepen emotional intimacy. Get inside each other and become students of each other. Court each other, romance each other, nurture and nourish each other. Work at having great sex, at playfulness, fun, and adventure. Let’s rearrange the words in the title for a moment. Instead of “Why Fighting is Good For Your Marriage”, think “Why Fighting For Your Marriage Is Good”! When you turn toward your spouse and build that positive connection, you are fighting for your marriage. And I am passionate about fighting for my marriage!
Image courtesy of Ed Yourdon under the Creative Commons license.
Ahhhh, marital bliss! Socrates himself apparently once said, “By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”
We joke and we laugh about terrible wives and worse husbands. The truth of the matter is, unless we invest in our marriages, we will never have a deep, intimate, rewarding relationship with our spouse.
So today's post is nice and simple (even if it gets a little deep at times)! We give you three things you can do to make your marriage happier.
1 – Be Willing to Change Your Beliefs
I questioned Caleb on this one as I’d always been taught to “buy the truth and sell it not”. How would it make my marriage happier to sell that truth!?! He informed him, however, that it did NOT mean changing my spiritual beliefs but about being willing to change what I think makes the perfect marriage.
We head into marriage making a covenant based on the assumption that nothing is going to change. But we DO change, and we need to roll with that and always be thinking about how we can bring our best to our marriage.
To quote Karney, from a study done in 2003, “Couples who stay happiest overall are the ones who change their beliefs about what is important in their relationships.”
For example, when we first married, I loved Caleb’s spontaneity and adventure. Now that we have kids, however, I appreciate the stability that Caleb gives our family.
The marriages that stay happy by shifting beliefs decide “that whatever aspects of the marriage have declined must not be so important after all”. If I still clung to the fact that spontaneity and adventure were essential for happiness in my marriage, I would look at Caleb’s shortcomings and grow resentful.
So, we need to be willing to change our beliefs about what is important in our marriage.
2 – Positivity is the Fuel for Happiness
A bunch of researchers published a study in 1998 in the Journal of Family Violence, comparing the perceptions of marital positivity between healthy couples, distressed couples, and distressed and aggressive couples.
They found that happily married spouses engage in more frequent and special types of pleasurable communication. They also found that happily married spouses engage in higher quality spousal-specific caring gestures.
What lessons can we learn from these findings?
Be deliberate about vocalizing positive thoughts towards your spouse – that’s going to increase marital happiness. As it says in Proverbs 17:22, A joyful heart is good medicine! Philippians 4:8 reminds us to think on what is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, and worthy of praise.
Also, stop to think about what specific actions, gestures or things you can do that show you care.
Gratitude is so important in marriage. A study from 2011 (Personality and Individual Differences) found that more gratitude equals more marital satisfaction. Not only that but my FELT gratitude is a predictor of YOUR satisfaction, but my EXPRESSED gratitude is not. It’s not good enough just to say something, you have to actually mean it!
3 – If You’re Going to Fight, Get in the Ring and Do It Properly.
Sort of…
Positive fighting has more to do with engagement. Research, published in 2009, found that if either spouse is disengaged during a conflict, especially in the early years of marriage, the couple ended up experiencing their marriage as less trusting and intimate and were more distressed in their marriage overall.
As humans, we don’t like to fight (at least most of us don’t!). I think we kind of hold back or check out in the moment because we don’t want the fight to get out of control. While we don’t want fights to get out of control, this is NOT the right way to go about that.
The research also found that conflict avoidance predicted greater marital distress. Are we scared of our anger, or our spouse’s anger? Perhaps we have a martyr complex and just tell ourselves to suck it up?
Ever have a conversation that goes something like this?
Hubby: So are we all good then, honey?
Wifey: Yup.
Hubby: You’re sure.
Wifey: Yes, I’m fine.
Hubby: OK then. I’ll take your word for it…
What Exactly Is Womanspeak? Womanspeak is saying something where the meaning is different from the intent of the words spoken. And yes, I know it’s not just a woman thing. Not all women do it, and men are just as capable of speaking this way, we just stereotypically assign this to women (hence the name!). Just for the record, I prefer to call it husband-hearing!
I’ll give you a few examples of what I'm talking about– my word or phrase will be on the left and Caleb’s “interpretation” will be in brackets:
Fine (means: totally not fine at all)
You choose (means: you figure out the exact thing I secretly want to do)
Whatever (means: I only care about this enough to hold your anxiety hostage for another three days)
That’s ok (means: like you’re getting any sex for the next two weeks)
Communication is a tricky thing because it can derail in a variety of ways. When we communicate, we send a signal that may or may not be clear. The person receiving the signal may not receive it with the intent with which it was sent. Sometimes we may not even know exactly what we intend to send. Or perhaps our verbal communication can be in conflict with our non-verbal. We may even use words with one meaning but our tone of voice carries another meaning.
Here are a few more examples to illustrate the point:
“Is it cold in here?” could actually mean, “Can you please go turn up the heat?” Or, “Hey baby, do you want to snuggle? wink wink”.
Or think of the question, “Oh, are we having tuna casserole tonight?” That could mean: “I’m delighted because it’s my favorite!” Or, “Seriously, we’ve had that five nights in a row.” Or, “I don’t really care, I’m just curious.” Really, depending on the type of day I’ve had at home, I will hear that question totally differently. Why Do We Do It? To answer this question, we delved into the deeper reasons why we might not speak clearly.
Perhaps we don’t want to be the stereotypical nagging wife constantly asking for stuff so only hint at things instead.
Maybe (and this is something I know I struggle with) we have a fear of rejection. If I ask Caleb if he wants to peel the potatoes and he says no, that’s just his preference. But if I say, “Could you please peel the potatoes?” and he says no, that could feel like a personal rejection.
What about having a fear of intimacy or vulnerability? It’s a lot easier to test the waters with a vague question than ask for something outright and risk rejection. It’s a lot easier too, to say “Do I look fat in this?” than to be vulnerable and say, “I’m feeling insecure about my body right now”.
We’ve been over the HOW and WHY we use womanspeak, but after having witnessed it in our marriage and other marriages, I can say that it does not bring about the desired response. When you say one thing and mean another, it does not build intimacy.
Here’s what you need to do in order to have healthy communication between you: How Can We Have Good Clear Communication? 1. Learn to state your wants or requests clearly. For example, if you want him to do something, don’t start with “Do you want to….” Instead try, “Could you please…” 2. Don’t lie! Saying “I’m fine” when you’re not, is a lie. Be truthful and say something like “I’m not sure how I feel right now but if you give me some time to calm down I’ll come back to you as soon as I’m clear myself”. 3. State your expectations before it matters. This one is hard to explain without an example, so rather than an explanation, I’ll go straight into the story. If I’m planning something on the weekend, I need to state my expectations to my husband early in the week so that we’re both clear on what’s happening. That will prevent the feeling of abandonment and resentment that may come after the fact if the expectations weren’t stated clearly ahead o...
Maybe you’re not like me.
Maybe you don’t REACT to everything.
Maybe you should be writing this post about defensiveness…
In this week’s podcast episode, Caleb talked about defensiveness and how you can disarm your own defensiveness. I especially need to learn how to disarm my defensiveness, as I seem to react every single time to the slightest provocation!
Why is it that I can react so strongly to the smallest thing? I think it’s because I like to be right and I hate being wrong. That’s just me, and I’m ok with that, but I’m not ok with the defensive overreacting!
I was glad to hear that there is a part of defensiveness that is born out of our God-given instinct towards fight, flight or freeze. Defensiveness is the “fight” part of that. So maybe I’m not always overreacting – it’s a comforting thought to know that I can and will defend my loved ones when needed!
However, defensiveness in marriage goes beyond that and can become problematic. It is deflecting blame back on your spouse and saying, “I’m not the problem; you are!” Caleb says the antidote to defensiveness is to accept responsibility for your own stuff.
He makes it sound so simple…
So I asked Caleb, why does being defensive NOT work in marriage?
Because the more you defend yourself, the harsher your spouse has to be to get through to you. The thicker the concrete wall, the bigger the bomb needed to get through those walls.
Being defensive sometimes is not going to wreck a marriage. However, Dr. Gottman talks about the four horses of the apocalypse: the four most destructive features in marriage and defensiveness is one of them. He says that when all four horses are present in a relationship his research shows there is more than an 80% probability that the marriage will fail unless corrective action is taken.
I don’t know about you, but I want to eradicate any features in my marriage that will cause it to fail. Why do we get defensive? It could be that you or I have a fragile ego. Because we’re feeling fragile, we interpret our spouse’s disagreement with any of our ideas, choices or behaviors as a personal attack. “If you challenge my ideas, you are challenging me!” That’s about ego, hence the need to defend as if being attacked.
We may get defensive to protect ourselves, but in actuality, it produces more conflict – more of what we don’t want!
It may feel like we need years of therapy to get our fragile egos sorted, but here are two tips which can have an immediate impact in lessening our defensive reactions. Tip 1: Say, “You could be right.” That’s it.
So easy.
So simple.
Yet it creates such a powerful mind shift.
The next time you find yourself reacting to something said to you, and your instincts want to kick in to defend yourself, instead say, “You could be right.” That buys you some time to calm down without automatically going into fight mode! It keeps you open and lets you hear any genuinely constructive criticism that could be valid or actionable.
Even if the only good in what your spouse is saying is in the intent and the content is not worded well AT ALL, by saying “You could be right” you lower your own emotional resistance. It gives your spouse influence, which in turn puts you in a powerful place. If you shut your spouse down (by getting defensive), they are most definitely going to shut you down. Then you’re in a crazy cycle you don’t want to be in! Tip 2: Bring in an imaginary third party. Ask the question, “How would you respond if someone said that…”
Benjamin Franklin used this technique. It works very well if your spouse is being close-minded. It helps to keep us in a place of curiosity rather than having a knee jerk ‘fight’ reaction.
For example, Jack comes home hungry and says to his wife, “I can’t believe you haven’t started dinner. I’m really hungry! You’re just sitting there relaxing, while I’m starving!”
A typical (defensive) response that Jill might make would be something like, “You’ve got hands,
If you woke up tomorrow and a miracle happened so that you had a thriving, passionate marriage, what would you see differently? What would be the first signs that a miracle had occurred?
Today, on our podcast, Caleb introduced me to the “miracle question” above – the lynch pin question in Solution Focused Therapy.
You can ask this question about anything really. For example, “If you woke up tomorrow, and a miracle happened so that you no longer easily lost your temper, what would you see differently? What would the first signs be that the miracle occurred?”
Basically, in asking this question, you are asking a person to create a small shift in their thinking by looking at the other side of their problem and then coming back through from that side.
That sounds pretty complicated, but what I got from it was this: Sometimes I can find myself stuck on an issue and don’t know what to do with it. If I could envision what my life would look like without the problem, and then come back to the problem with that vision in my head, it can give me ideas of what I need to do next. It can also give me the motivation to become unstuck!
Let me give you an example. It’s not a marriage example, but a housewife one. Sometimes I just get overwhelmed with my house. It may not be terrible, but not how I want to keep my house. When Caleb asks me the ‘miracle question’ and I envision what my house would look like if a miracle occurred (how come this type of miracle never actually happens!?!?!), and then come back to my problem (my messy house) from that direction, I can generally think of what I need to do next. The Long Version Caleb also gave a LONG version of the same question. You really should listen to the podcast episode to get the full effect but I will do my best to type it as he spoke it. Think, calm, quiet, relaxing, SLOW voice as you read this: “I am going to ask you a rather strange question. [pause] The strange question is this: [pause] After we talk, you will go back to your work (home, school) and you will do whatever you need to do the rest of today, such as taking care of the children, cooking dinner, watching TV, giving the children a bath, and so on. It will be time to go to bed. Everybody in your household is quiet, and you are sleeping in peace. In the middle of the night, a miracle happens and the problem we’re discussing right now is solved! But because this happens while you are sleeping, you have no way of knowing that there was an overnight miracle that solved the problem. [pause] So, when you wake up tomorrow morning, what might be the small change that will make you say to yourself, ‘Wow, something must have happened—the problem is gone!’”? Then you must wait, SILENTLY, for the answer. Let your spouse be creative and come up with an answer! What's the Point? Caleb and I finally discussed what the point of this question is. It’s definitely not a natural response in the middle of a problem that seems to have no solutions. So, what is the point?
This question breaks you out of your box – your usual way of thinking. It takes big drama, inspires creativity, and helps your spouse see that there are steps they can take to start to shift their own circumstances.
And it can be used anywhere: in marriage, at work, with your kids, with a girlfriend!
But, you have to ask it well. You have to ask it slowly, and then wait, SILENTLY, for the answer.
I have to admit when Caleb first starting talking about it, it sounded pretty “woo-woo” to me, but after thinking it through, it made a lot of sense. Now I can’t wait to try it on Caleb, but given that I’m married to a marriage therapist, he always seems to think of these things first! :)
Give it a try the next time you and your spouse are at a stalemate!
Image courtesy of Daniel under the Creative Commons license.
Guilt is an effective motivator.
It’s also a great way to make you an unbearable spouse.
If you’ve ever had someone lay the, “If you really loved me you would…” guilt trip on you then you know exactly how that makes you feel. Loathing. Disgust. Nothing like, “I love you! I’d love to do that for you!”
Motivating your spouse to change by using guilt may get you the short-term gains but it is going to cause long term pain. Why Do We Use Guilt on Our Spouse? It does work as a technique to help a powerless person in a relationship get his or her own way. But it is just not healthy when used to this end.
It causes resentment and anger in marriages. It dampens a child’s sense of independence and self-control (Mandara & Pike, 2008) and can lead to depressive symptoms and low self-esteem (Leith & Baumeister, 2008).
So while it does create leverage to obtain the outcome you want, it really is hard on your spouse and on your children.
Often we do this because it was modeled for us in our family of origin.
Or, we may do it because we genuinely do have less power in the relationship. Guilt is a way to even out the power imbalance. So I do want to call out all the control freaks here: if your spouse is guilting you, it may be because you aren’t sharing power with him or her in your marriage. So when you are getting guilted, just give yourself a real honest check-in to see if you’re provoking it. The Entitlement Twist One of my huge life-lessons when I first got married was understanding how selfish I was.
I think we all bring some entitlement to the relationship. Because we’re in love I deserve or expect a lot from you. That can also come out in the language, “If you really loved me, you would…”
The research shows when one spouse brings excessive entitlement to a marriage that there are some real nasties associated with this. Violence. Aggression. Higher divorce rates. And–surprise—selfishness! If You Really Loved Me, You Would Stop Guilting Me We reveal some key things to do to replace the guilt and entitlement during the episode. But for those of you that are reading this, here are a couple of key points to note.
First, find a healthier way to express your needs. Try: “I would really like you to …, is there any way that can happen?”
Second: learn gratitude. Really. If you bring an attitude of service to your marriage it will pay far greater dividends than an attitude of entitlement. Entitlement is a sin. Confess, repent, and serve.
Image courtesy of Jason under the Creative Commons license.
I found the topic of triangles in marriage to be fascinating. How often do I get my nose out of joint by something my husband does? And then try to get my support from someone else? THAT is creating a triangle!
What Is A Triangle?
Triangles are three-way relationships. Usually, this looks like mom-dad-child, or an unpopular variant: husband-wife-mistress. Sometimes the husband’s work can be his mistress…
They usually consist of two close parties and one distant one. For example, Dad is angry and abusive (distant) so Mom and oldest daughter are close and allied against Dad. Or, husband and work are close and wife is distant.
Why Do We Triangulate? On the positive side, because they help us relate and understand one another. When we’re not getting along with a parent, we can talk to our spouse.
Triangles can also be used to relieve tension. In any 1 to 1 relationship, tensions grow. These tensions can be relieved by bringing in a third party but can also really increase problems.
Look at it this way: couples that aren’t getting along can talk about their kids, their friends, work; anything but their own relationship. They can both be close to the issue at hand and be distant from each other. The ideal though would be for the couple to be close to each other and allied (distant) against the issue.
Identified Patients (IP’s) are also created by triangles. (An Identified Patient is the one seen to be the “problem” when a family goes for therapy.) Often times the IP is one of the children acting out subconsciously to relieve the tension between the parents. When both parents are focused on the behavior of the child, they are not dwelling on their own tension-creating problems. What Drives Our Need To Triangulate? In its simplest form, we triangulate because we have anxiety about closeness. This is about “How close can I be to my spouse and still allow the other person to be different from me?
You can see this when you go home to your parents. If one parent does something socially embarrassing, are you embarrassed? Or do you allow them to feel their own embarrassment and recognize it is not yours to feel while still feeling close to him/her?
Or look at another example: you and your spouse are arguing. One of you points to a kid and says, “Bobby agrees with me and he thinks you’re wrong too!” You just ran into the question: how close can I be and allow you to be different than me? What you thought, perhaps subconsciously, is “If I can’t be close, I’m going to make Bobby close and distance you in order to bring you back to being the same as me.” It reduces my anxiety because I have a coalition with Bobby and I am now controlling you. Let’s De-triangulate! What do we need to do to counter this triangulation in our marriages?
First, recognize that it’s always going on and accept that, BUT, watch for unhealthy triangulation in the form of distancing between you and your spouse. Don’t triangulate your kids in order to take the anxiety out of the deficiencies in your own marriage. Remember the Identified Patient – ever see a child who is a problem child because it gives both parents something to be together on?
Second, talk about it! Talk about what you need to be together on as parents. Talk about boundaries you might need to set on in-laws, work, or affair possibilities.
Thirdly, become an emotionally mature, well-differentiated person.
Understand your Family Of Origin (FOO) – did your parents draw you in to take sides and relieve their own anxiety? Are you repeating the process in your own family? Learn to identify, name and own your own feelings. Develop a healthy, self-identity and live out of that place instead of others’ expectations. (And this one I LOVE!) Be OK with being different than your spouse: don’t get fixated on how little you have in common. Get fixated on loving each other with the variety you both bring to the marriage.
Fourthly, Stand up for what you believe in – in your marriage!
Does homeschooling actually wreck marriages? Absolutely! But no more than sending your kids to public school…
No matter what situation we find ourselves in, we need to realize the impact on our marriage and compensate accordingly. The fact is homeschooling presents different challenges than public schooling or even having both parents work outside the home. Each scenario has its own challenges!
So, while homeschooling is great, it’s good to be specifically aware of a few things with regards to your marriage.
Here are some of the challenges to marriage that we hear about from people who homeschool:
The husband can feel like he’s getting the shaft when it comes to the time, energy and commitment wife gives to the marriage. He can start to get resentful if he feels like there is nothing left for him at the end of the day. Marriage care tends to be pushed to the bottom of the list as day-to-day life becomes more child-centered. What if the kids went to public/private/Christian school and my wife got a job? Dreaming about the what-if’s of a two-income family can create resentment. Finances are the #1 reason for divorce. Husband and wife are not together on this commitment. A cardinal rule of parenting is that both parents need to be in agreement! Poor role division. Overloading either mom or dad can have an adverse impact on their health, the marriage, and the family. Also, it is easy for Mom to become the homeschooling parent and Dad to become only the breadwinner. That’s not healthy, Dad needs to know how he can be involved with the family (and be involved!) and Dad and Mom both need to support each other.
Here are four things you need to do to combat the unique challenges of a homeschooling marriage:
Remember, God called you to marriage before parenting (usually), so love your spouse more than your homeschooling! Find your self-identity: Aim to have a thriving, passionate marriage of homeschooling parents – not a homeschooling marriage! Your identity is in Christ, not your educational preference. We are all going to grieve and celebrate becoming empty-nesters. If you define your identity as a home-schooling mom, then what are you going to be when you are not homeschooling? Who are you then? Another question to ask is if you are “homeschoolers” or people that teach at home? What is your identity? Have non-school conversations and non-school dates! If it’s the two of you together at the zoo – enjoy your time together at the zoo and stop planning your ecology module… Self Care! Homeschooling demands sacrifice by both parents. What are you doing for self-care? How are you investing in your marriage elsewhere to compensate for the sacrifice you and your spouse make daily?
A mom once told me that pre-children she used to be disgusted with a woman who didn’t take care of their feet and had dry heels. Now, she is glad if she manages to shower on a given day. How priorities change when we have responsibilities 24/7!
What are you doing to take care of yourself and your marriage!?!
Obviously, there is nothing wrong with your marriage and it’s not on the rocks just because you homeschool! We just want you to pause and assess whether everything is in balance. Every marriage needs to do this – everybody has his or her own challenges.
Homeschooling is a major commitment and decision that you feel is a clear blessing to your children. We wouldn’t dispute that, but we want you to stop, do a check-in and ask yourself, “Hey, is my marriage still first”?
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I certainly hope reading this is going to make you want to find your spouse right now and give them a GREAT BIG SQUEEZE! And don’t be fooled – we’re not talking about how tightly you squeeze, we’re talking about how well you do the squeeze!
The Power of the Hug The power of hugging is not to be underestimated. In fact, research supports how it can be a great way to improve your marriage. In 2003, Grewen, Anderson, Girlder and Light found that couples who enjoyed more episodes of positive close contact responded with lower blood pressure and heart rate elevations in response to the stresses and strains of daily living.
On that same note, couples who did not express lots of physical affection were eight times more likely to feel stressed or depressed. In another study, they tried giving one person verbal social support when they were stressed and found that it did not have the same positive effect as actual physical contact.
Seriously, I could go on and on with research that proves the point that close contact prevents “life’s hiccups” from hitting us so hard physically! What Does a Hug Do? A close physical connection creates an instant entry into the world of your spouse’s emotions. Can you feel their body heaving with sobs? Can you feel how tightly they’re strung with worry? Can you feel their desire for you? An incredible range of emotions is felt through hugging!
Hugging also creates an increase in the release of oxytocin, the body’s natural love drug. Not only does oxytocin lower your blood pressure and heart rate, but it also boosts happiness, fine-tunes communication skills, improves every day relationships and chases away anxiety and stress. How to Hug As you can see, we all need to hug more. However, let us tell you exactly how you can be a Master Hugger! We’ve created a little video entitled How to Hug Like a Boss because really, how can you describe a hug with words?!? Plus, how do you know when your hug is done? We really do not have a good answer to that second question, so let us know your ideas. We’d love to hear from you!
Image courtesy of Tania Cataldo under the Creative Commons license.
Ladies, isn’t it an awesome feeling when you overhear your husband talking to one of his buddies and he says something nice about you?
If you have already listened to the podcast, then you know that Caleb started quoting “nice things” about me from the Songs of Solomon. Lol! Overhearing compliments such as “Guys, my wife’s belly is as a heap of wheat encircled with lilies” may not to be too exciting for us today, but Caleb’s point was to find the language that works for your wife – even now.
The even greater point is this:
It’s so easy to take our spouses for granted. However, we want you to make it a personal agenda, and a real habit, to speak well of your spouse.
This is a small and willful gesture that can pay huge dividends inside your marriage. It’s also a great way to add another layer of affair-proofing to your marriage. Speaking well of your spouse to others is a great way to protect yourself from potential affairs. It sends a message that you are not only committed to but very much in love with your spouse and not interested in anyone else. Mental Health In 1989, Hooley and Teasdale did a study on married people with depression. They found that the single best prediction of relapse into neurotic depression was the patient’s response to the following question: “How critical is your spouse of you?”
Depressed patients who rated their spouses as highly critical of them were significantly more likely to relapse during their follow-up than the patients who felt less criticized.
Just think of the impact you can have in his/her life, as speaking well of your spouse, instead of criticizing, has a direct correlation on their health!
Criticism, on the other hand, is very corrosive and is a primary ingredient for any unhappy marriage. Proverbs 27:15 says it very well – “A continual dripping on a rainy day and a quarrelsome wife are alike”… I’m pretty sure we can apply that quarrelsome attribute to both genders! Negative Comments So, “Does this mean I can NEVER say ANYTHING negative?”
Nersesian found that five heartfelt compliments will erase the damage done by one slip of the lips. And Gottman states that in a happy marriage there is a 5-to-1 ratio of good comments to bad. 50/50 is not good enough! Make it your habit to speak well of your spouse and the odd negative comment that accidently slips out will not corrode your marriage.
As Caleb says, “Negativity is like a bad rash. You can’t let it spread and get all over everything!” Nip it in the bud and decide to be positive today. Marriage Satisfaction Another study by Gordon & Baucom is necessary to look at here. Their research findings concluded that those who rated their spouse as being particularly positive reported higher levels of satisfaction in their marriage. If you think your spouse is positive, it will make you happier in your marriage.
So, what story are you choosing to tell yourself about your husband or wife?
If your circle of friends gets together to complain about their spouses, choose to tell a different story! Be the one who compliments and speaks well to others about your life partner. Not only will this positive outlook make you happier in your own marriage, but you just may influence your friends for the better too!
Christians have been trying to figure out for centuries: is divorce and remarriage ever the right thing to do? For some, that’s an intellectual discussion – for others, it’s a huge, unexpected reality in their lives.
Back in Episode 13, we answered the question, “Is it ever OK to say, ‘If you do XYZ I’m going to divorce you’”? In response to that post, a spouse wrote us to ask, “If there are repeated acts of infidelity over several years, is it OK to say, ‘If you do this one more time, I am going to divorce you’? One comment that the listener provided was: “Once you say that, the whole nature of the relationship changes.”
I want to be upfront about a few things here. The following is what Caleb and I believe to be right, at this moment. We reserve the right to change our minds – we don’t want to come across as having it “all figured out”!
Also, I have extreme empathy for any of our listeners who are in this situation and are wrestling with this question. It is very difficult even to write this through my tears knowing the pain and questions in so many people’s hearts. So, if you’re in this situation, please reach out. We’d love to connect with you. For those of you not in this kind of dilemma, be thankful and then work on your marriage EVERY SINGLE DAY so you never find yourself in a situation like this!
That said, here’s our take:
Divorce does not please God. It is very hard on both spouses and very, very hard on children.
Generally speaking, husbands and wives should not desert or divorce their spouses and if they do, they should remain single and attempt to be reconciled. (1 Corinthians 7:10 & 11) However, there are three exceptions where a person can remarry:
•Where an unbelieving spouse deserts the marriage, the saved spouse is free to remarry. (1 Corinthians 7:15)
•In the case of sexual immorality; the bond is already broken and the faithful spouse is under no obligations to the covenant. (Matthew 5:31-32)
•If your spouse dies. (Romans 7:1-4)
Other than #3 though, life rarely fits so clearly or easily in the categories that we provided!
We believe that a couple should always aim for reconciliation, forgiveness, and rebuilding. We have seen that those marriages are often sweeter than even marriages that have never experienced the trauma of something major like an affair.
Pruch, a writer from a Baptist Seminary, suggests that “all cases should be handled on a case-by-case basis with great care and reliance on God’s Spirit through prayer, in concert with one’s elders and church family, while urging the guilty towards repentance.”
Perhaps, instead of divorce, we should be placing more emphasis on separation and suspending the divorce decision, while we work through a process of facilitating restoration and reconciliation.
When we discussed this issue in Episode 13 (link above), it was more for “minor threats”, or even using the threat as a joke or a way to get your own way. Obviously, the question from this listener is no joking matter.
So, to our listeners who are currently struggling with this, it’s definitely a complex matter. You have some biblical guidelines and you need to make your decision based on a multitude of factors including:
Your own ability to forgive and reconcile.
Your evaluation of your spouse’s ability to seek help and find healing so that they become safe, monogamous lover for you.
Your own willingness to own your flaws and mistakes and not in any way enable the relationship to return to its broken state.
Your understanding of your own beliefs about whether remarriage is an option for you or if you would prefer to remain single.
Your understanding of your church community’s position on this.
Again, deciding whether to remain, separate or divorce your partner takes a lot of prayers and wise counsel. Therefore, we would recommend that you talk to responsible members of your church that can provide you with some helpful spiritual insight.
To all our other readers,
We had the privilege this week of interviewing Tyler Ward, author of Marriage Rebranded: Modern Misconceptions & the Unnatural Art of Loving Another Person.
Tyler found that about 18 months into his marriage, despite having an awesome wife, things started to go south. Fights and arguments were becoming the norm. Knowing that he wanted better for his marriage, Tyler started to look at his own preconceived ideas of what marriage should look like. He began to scientifically "test" (I loved reading the results!) different ideas of how to improve his marriage and other aspects of life too. And rather than have me tell you the punchline, you need to go read his book for yourself! :)
Let me tell you this though, Tyler is a believer who comes at the subject of marriage with a real sense of care, humour and insight. He is both biblically informed and also research informed in his thinking about marriage which really echoes with our own approach to God’s wonderful blessing of marriage.
Rather than transcribe the whole conversation, we’re giving you the opportunity to either listen to the audio or watch the video of the interview.
You can find his book at:
Amazon.com - Marriage Rebranded Barnes&nobles.com - Marriage Rebranded iBooks (through iTunes) Moodycollective.com - Marriage Rebranded
To follow Tyler and get updates on what he comes out with next, go to www.tylerwardis.com
Tyler also has a free ebook available in which he compiled the best quotes and advice from 25 marriage "professionals". Definitely worth taking a look at! You can find that at Noisetrade.
Who ever starts their day by thinking, “Hey, I’m going to have an affair today?” Doesn’t happen! But, how many people do you know – or maybe this has been you – that find themselves one day asking, “How did this affair ever happen to our marriage?”
Our prayer in writing this is that it makes someone who is reading, suck air and go “OH BOY – it’s time to make an about-turn because I’m headed for a serious marital train wreck!”
While we can never be “safe” from the risk of an affair, we can take measures to safeguard our marriages.
As the Bible says, “Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed that he does not fall.” We need to remember that none of us are invincible, but we also need to remember that some of us are at more risk than others. If any of the following points describe you, then you need to take extra precautions to guard your marriage against an affair.
The following risk factors are from a meta-analysis done in 2010 by Tsapelas, Fisher, and Aron. While this is quite a list, it is so important for each of us to be aware of the risks to our relationship.
- Relationship satisfaction (how satisfied am I with our marriage?)
Boredom Lack of emotional support Frequency and quality of sex Felt love Low agreeableness Low conscientiousness
- Mental health or psychological issues
Psychopathology (depression, anxiety, etc.) Narcissism (thinking high of self) Excessive alcohol consumption Childhood sexual abuse Role modeling by father (generational infidelity patterns) Attachment anxiety: spouses who are uncertain of the availability of spouse and cope by seeking reassurance from and clinging to their spouse Attachment avoidance: spouses who doubt the availability of close relationships with others and cope by avoiding behaviors that promote intimacy
- Self-perception
More socially desirable = more infidelity Women more motivated by the need for intimacy and self-esteem Women more motivated by dissatisfaction with marriage Men overall have a stronger desire to engage in sexual infidelity
- Social factors
Lack of religiosity Higher-income (opportunity, entitlement) Work that involves touching clients, discussing personal concerns with colleagues or clients, or working alone with co-workers
Moving onto more positive things! Here are three things that you can do to strengthen and maintain your marriage while decreasing the risk of an affair. 1. Keep Deepening Your Love The best way to protect your marriage is to build a strong attachment bond. Sue Johnson (2004) puts it this way: “Become a source of security, protection and contact comfort for your spouse. Assist each other in difficult emotional circumstances and in developing a positive and potent sense of self.
In plain English, invest in your marriage!
Show love and consideration to one another. Share the power in your relationship (listen to episode 003 – Receiving Influence, for more information on what this means). Learn to be there emotionally for each other, so neither spouse has a desire to look elsewhere for that emotional bond. And last but not least – be sexy! Date, flirt, wink, tease… the list could go on!
- Own Your Stuff Sometimes it is easier to bury our feelings or to blame others for them than it is to face the feelings directly. Oftentimes though, facing them is the only way we can find healing from them.
Face any mental health issues – seek outside help. Face any past sexual abuse, poor role modeling, brokenness: seek healing 1 Corinthians 7 tells us no to withhold our bodies from our spouse. It is ok to be a low desire spouse if that’s all there is to it, but if you pull back from physical intimacy because of deeper issues, don’t let your history, your brokenness, your victimization become your dominant message. Face these things - seek healing. Watch for an entitlement from positions of power (e.g., pastor, business owner, teacher) or wealth
After going on a vacation, have you ever noticed the fact that oftentimes your family and friends are more excited about your vacation than you are? Sure, a lot of us enjoy our vacations, but they can be kind of stressful too! Why is it that we expect uninterrupted bliss, but the reality is most of us have our little spats, our frustrations and disappointments on vacation?
Holidays are necessary and biblical. Even Jesus Christ would encourage his disciples to “come apart and rest awhile”. So yes, we need holidays!
Why then are there so many challenges and dissatisfactions around our vacations?
One good explanation comes from Rosenblatt & Russell. They conducted a study on our expectations surrounding our vacations. What they discovered is that people have very high expectations for their vacations and tend to idealize them. They cited that people expected to come back from their vacation totally revitalized after having a time of intense and loving family togetherness, and also becoming one with nature. In reality, vacations aren’t usually 100 percent awesome, but for some reason we expect them to be.
How can we correct this? 1. Head in with realistic expectations! No couple has a perfect marriage and no family gets along perfectly. Even if it looks like they do on their blog – they don’t! So, be prepared for some of the same interpersonal difficulties to arise on vacation as they do at home, but don’t treat them like they’re the end of the world and the end of the happy vacation.
Be aware of dynamics of traveling with other people. It will change things and if you can anticipate this and are prepared to make the adjustments it will make the vacation go a lot more smoothly.
Also, be prepared to negotiate and compromise during the planning for each day and realize that every vacation is not going to hit the ball out of the park. 2. Talk about the “division of labor” before you head in! While this doesn’t sound vacation-like, daily maintenance is a part of any vacation. Talking about it ahead of time eases the stress surrounding it. For instance, discuss and decide who is going to be responsible for meals, decision making, packing, childcare, etc.
Be aware of your own sense of entitlement. Do you tend to come into your vacation with the thought that you deserve a break and are going to do nothing? Or is this vacation a time when you could serve your spouse and lessen his/her load?
Caleb gave the example, on this weeks’ podcast episode, of trying to get out of the campsite in the morning. Because he always left first in the mornings at home, he never saw the work it took to get three kids ready for the day. When camping, he would sit in the car and get frustrated that the girls and I weren’t ready when he said “Let’s go!” It was a mind shift for him to realize that he could help brush their hair before I braided it or make lunch. By doing these things, it made my load easier too. (I suggested that he could braid the girls’ hair on our next vacation, but for some reason he didn’t jump at that…) 3. Plan together! This is a discussion that needs to take place before you book any holidays. Together with your spouse, talk about the big picture and what you both want to achieve with your vacation.
Do you want adventure? Rest? Contemplation? Family visit? Hot or Cold climate? Sports (ie. Skiing)? Hobby (ie fishing)? Romance? Touring all over or staying in one place and exploring deeply?
There may have to be some compromise. Agree to do one type of vacation this year, and another next year depending on the desire of each spouse.
Realize that if you both need a vacation to reduce stress, having kids along will make that extremely difficult. There are times when dropping the children off at their grandparents or with some close friends for the weekend and having a complete break is necessary.
And last, but definitely not least, talk about money! What can we afford for this vacation?
In 2003,
You know, even if you are committed to your marriage, you can still make it a miserable experience. Today, we will look at three negativity traps you can fall into and how to get out of them!
If you have ever felt yourself stuck in a rut of negativity, you know how draining that can be on you and your spouse. Negativity is not something anybody should dwell on. So, as we explore the topic today, we also want to remind you that except when it comes to related medical complications, happiness is very often just a choice.
Yes, if you train yourself to make the choice of happiness 10, 50, 100 times a day, you are going to infuse A LOT of joy into your marriage.
The three types of negativity we are going to look at today are rumination, bitterness and ingratitude. Rumination Rumination is going over and over the same bad negative things again and again. It usually focuses on the past or present (vs. worrying which focuses on the future). Along with focusing on negativity, rumination brings with it a with a desire to understand what happened; however, there is usually no conscious responsibility to take action that comes along with it.
Rumination gives an excuse that says as long as I keep hashing the situation through and figuring it out, I don’t actually have to take the responsibility and deal with it.
A study from 2008 (Noeln/Hoeksema, Wisco & Lyubormirsky) found that rumination consistently predicts the onset of depression. In other words, where there is a pattern of rumination, you are putting yourself at risk for depression.
That’s why it is important to stop the negative pattern and instead focus on the positive. While we do need to take the time to ponder our failures, figure out what went wrong and come up with how we can do things differently in the future, something constructive needs to come out of this way of thinking. Remember, focusing on the positive results in happiness!
How can you do this? Take what we call “happy breaks”. Play happy music loudly, jump on your trampoline, or go for a run.
It is also a good idea to plan a problem-solving session where you’re actually going to sit down and deal with the issue. Don’t ignore what goes wrong in your life. Instead, balance out the time you spend thinking about it, and take breaks of happiness at regular intervals.
Another great way to knock rumination out of your life is to get your eyes off yourself and onto someone else. And of course, it’s always a good idea to focus on the relationships closest to you – especially your marriage! Bitterness Unforgiveness registers in body stress, and there is plenty of research that shows how stress impacts you physically. It can also cause medical and mental health problems.
When it comes to the offenses that come at us, although we can’t control them, we can control our response. Will you become angry and bitter? Are you going to let stress and its effects consume you? Or are you going to forgive and move on?
Bitterness can also create a victim mentality – it gives you an identity of being a wounded individual. Once you have this mindset, it is easy to stay there and ruminate, but really, you’re hurting yourself more than anybody else.
Something to help us overcome bitterness is empathy. Remember that hurt people hurt people. If you have been hurt or wounded, try to understand that the offense came from someone who is most likely hurting inside. Empathy is the understanding that if I had walked in their shoes up until this point, who am I to think that I would have acted any differently? Empathy stops our pride and keeps the bitterness at bay. Ingratitude Gratitude is a state of being thankful. It is something that has to be cultivated and expressed often. When it comes to our marriages, it is easy to take our spouse for granted and fall into the habit of ingratitude as a direct result. A great way to throw little positive tidbits into your marriage is to learn to notice the kind and selfless acts of your spouse...
Why do we spend so much time comparing ourselves to others? Is it a fear of rejection? Of not being good enough?
Making comparisons is never healthy, but in the context of marriage, it can suck the soul right out of it. It is draining and destructive. Why? It's because it leaves us looking for what we don’t have instead of focusing on what we do have.
Often when we are comparing our spouse to others, we are just cherry-picking certain qualities that we want to focus on, but we need to remember that the person we’re comparing our spouse to comes as a whole package.
As long as you think that something out there will make your life better, you’re denying reality. You’re also taking away from yourself the opportunity to develop your own appreciation for the beauty of your own marriage, your own spouse. So, what should you do when the urge arises? Make the choice to see in your spouse the beautiful compliment for who you are.
There was research done in 1982 by Sanders & Suls that stated some interesting findings on this topic. For example, they found that a sense of equity induces satisfaction. One way to look at this is, if I think that I put a lot more into our marriage than my husband (comparing my efforts to his) I will feel deprived. On the other hand, if I perceive that my husband’s efforts are equitable, then I will be more satisfied.
In other words, if you want to transform your marriage, work hard to make sure your spouse feels equitable in terms of contribution.
Another finding in the study was that if I feel good about my marriage, comparing it to others will make me feel even better. Oppositely, if I feel bad about it, comparing it will make me feel even worse.
Either way, making comparisons to your marriage is not healthy. If you feel something is lacking, you need to talk directly to your spouse about what is happening.
Before doing so, start off by asking yourself, "Do I have a perception problem or is there actually a shortcoming? Then have a conversation about it! Don’t let things fester while you compare your spouse to others.
If the problem is your attitude – own up to it and change it. Focus on the positive! If there actually is an issue with your spouse, bring it up and talk it out.
In Isaiah 45, a word picture is painted of a clay pot arguing with its maker. In a lot of ways, this is what we are doing when we are comparing ourselves, or our spouse, with others. We are saying that God should have made me (or my spouse) this way or that way… It is a rebuttal of God’s wisdom in creating you and is just a breeding ground for jealousy.
Comparison does not solve anything. It only creates a sense of dissatisfaction. Instead of lamenting on what we don’t have (but can see in others), we need to focus on what is right here, present in our lives. Q&A Section Referring to the article, 10 Habits of Happy Couples, Edwin asks: “Is this just the things that happy couples do already? Or if unhappy couples start doing them, they will become happier (note, I didn't say happy). Do you have to change feelings to change behaviour or does changing behaviour change feelings?”
I thought Caleb and I were going to disagree on this one. What do you think? Let us know in the comments below!
In the podcast, Caleb referred to Episode 003, Receiving Influence From Your Wife. Go have a listen or read to find out what he was referring to.
Where do you go with your stress? Do you take it out on your wife or husband? Or do you take it to your spouse?
I know, I know, there are a lot of jokes about marriage adding to your stress… The great thing about marriage though, is that its design is perfect for the management and reduction of stress.
One of the fundamental invitations of Jesus Christ was to give rest/relief as Matthew 11:28 states, “Come unto me, all who labor and I will give you rest.” Obviously, we can’t save our spouse, but we can be the secure sounding board that will give them relief from outside stresses. God wants us to be at peace and at rest and has designed marriage as a tool to get us to that place in our lives. How does this work? Before we go on… If you haven’t listened to (or read) Episode 15, go do it now. Listening with understanding is the key to reducing your spouse’s stress.
Talk it out! Try to talk for 10 to 20 minutes about a stressor and give as much detail as possible. Something to keep in mind is that this is for stress outside the relationship, this is not related to relationship issues! Those need to be talked out too, but that is not what we’re discussing here.
In general, men seem to feel obliged to solve a problem, while women take their husband's problem and make it their own. Don’t do either! Caleb and I have fun with this as we notice ourselves doing these stereotypical things.
Husbands: Just listen. I was meaning just listen to your wife, but again, listen to Episode 15 too! It’s about listening to understand. Just hear her out and make sure you understand what she’s telling you and more importantly what she’s feeling. Don’t feel you need to solve the problem!
Wives: Again, listen! Listen to understand. Don’t make his stress your problem and get wound up and fuel the fire and make his stress bigger (I am SO guilty of this one). I know that the she-bear wants to come out when our husband is criticized, but making his problem our problem doesn’t help him or us. Just hear him out. Make sure you respond in such a way that he knows you heard him. What he really needs is wound down, not wound up!
Oh yeah, and make sure you trade roles. Sometimes Caleb gets home and I’m so busy ranting and raving and de-stressing that I forget to ask about his day. And by the time he’s done hearing about mine, he doesn’t want to add his own stress! Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating here (at least I hope I am!) but make sure you take turns hearing each other out.
That’s the fabulous thing about marriage – it’s a safe, secure, non-judgemental place to air everything out. Why doesn’t this always work? Protector: We know a guy who feels he needs to protect his family from his stress. So instead of talking to his wife about it, he takes it out on his wife and kids in anger and harshness (and yes, that is his own confession). 10 minutes of talking it out and receiving empathy from his wife would make such a difference in this situation.
Fear of Dependency: Another reason for not sharing stress, is the Fear of Dependency (if you haven’t listened to Episode #9, go do it now). Some people, especially men, feel that they need to stand alone and not depend on anyone. This really puts up barriers to intimacy. Other ways to use your marriage for stress relief? Comfort Sex: Sexy Marriage Radio mentioned that there are different kinds of sex, and using sex for comfort is one of them.
Gifts/Pampering/Popcorn: Yes, popcorn is my comfort food and if I’m stressed, Caleb knows I’ll enjoy it. It has become a joke between us now, but seriously, find out what is a comfort to your spouse and give it to him/her!
Go on a date.
Show Empathy. Review In review, marriage should be a safe harbor. It is one of the few places you can get a non-judgmental listening ear and receive honest, supportive feedback. Talking about the stress in your life and receiving empathy from your spouse creates togetherness and increases intimacy while decreasing stress levels.
How awesome does it feel to be completely understood by someone – to feel that they ‘get’ you when you are explaining a problem!? Do you want to be a spouse that is able to give this blessing?
Listening to understand is one of those skills in marriage that doesn’t have a very sexy label, but is going to go a long ways towards building a thriving, passionate marriage.
I know you’re probably thinking, “But everyone knows how to listen, right? How could it be such a skill?” The reality is, most of us listen to respond, rather than listen to understand! Listen to Understand: 4 Methods There are 4 kinds of active listening responses: clarifying, paraphrasing, reflecting and summarizing. These come from the work of Cormier and Nurius. 1. Clarifying Rephrase to understand. Try using, “Are you saying…?” or “So, you mean…?”. By rephrasing what was said and repeating it back to the sayer, clarifying helps to deal with ambiguity and vagueness.
For example:
Wife [after hectic day]: I just feel like it never stops.
Husband clarifies: Are you saying you’d like me to be more involved with the kid's bedtime routine? (pulling clarification from the context of the day).
On a complete side note here – all you ladies, listen up! Try to avoid “women-speak”. If you need help, ask for it. It is so much easier on the relationship, and on ourselves, than hinting and hoping our husband catches the hint! 2. Paraphrasing Rephrase your spouse’s content and repeat it back to them. This helps them get more specific. It also helps them to know if you’re interpreting their meaning correctly and lets you dig a little deeper into what they really mean.
For example:
Husband: I tried talking to Fred about his lack of results in sales last month, but it was really difficult. He would hardly say a word and I don’t know what to do with him.
Wife paraphrases: Fred is not responding when you’re trying to coach him? 3. Reflecting Reflecting is like paraphrasing but pulls the ‘feeling’ words out. This is huge for communicating that you understand, and for helping your spouse to feel understood. It helps them identify core feelings, issues, and concerns. It really goes past the content of what they said to the process of what they’re feeling about a situation.
For example:
Wife (for the full effect, read this out loud - take a big breath and let it all come spilling out in a rush!): Little Jimmy came home today and blasted in the door, threw his backpack into my arms and blew right by me shouting over his shoulder that he was heading to the neighbor’s to play on his new game console.
Husband: So you felt disappointed? Maybe kind of hurt and angry about being treated like you were his maid rather than being greeted respectfully as his mom?
(At this point, I, the wife, would yell YES and fall into his arms because he actually understood me!!!) 4. Summarizing Summarizing really ties multiple pieces together. It is a combo of 2 or more of clarifying, paraphrasing and reflecting.
For example:
Husband: I am just so done with my brother, Joe. I am sick and tired of his negativity and criticism all the time. It was great when he was in that sales job but since he’s been unemployed it’s like he’s so bitter and hard to be with. I don’t know what to do with him or about him now.
Wife: Sounds like you’re kind of sad about losing the old Joe that you knew and enjoyed so much. Are you saying that you wish you could find a way to help him? Listen to Understand: Other Tips That sums up the four kinds of active listening, but another great tip is to use good questions.
Use open questions rather than closed questions. Open questions require a longer answer, while closed questions only require a yes or a no. Rather than asking, “Did something happen today?” (yes or no answer), you could ask “What happened today that made you upset?” (needs a few more words!).
As we’ve mentioned before, be aware of the timing! Some times are just not great to have deep discussions.
A Ritual of Emotional Connection This is a quick episode again as we are still vacationing in South Dakota!
Dr. John Gottman, a leading researcher in the field of marriage therapy, encourages couples to establish what he calls, "rituals of emotional connection."
There are hundreds of possibilities, but in this episode we share with you a quick one that we practice nearly every day. We use it in that busy time between getting home from work and eating our evening meal together.
What is 5-for-5? It's simple, and it's geared typically towards husbands who come home to their wives after work in the evening. It could be tailored to fit your circumstances if they are different.
What I do is spend five minutes, right after I get home, within five feet of Verlynda. That's 5-for-5: five minutes within five feet. I put my iPhone down and just spend the time finding out about her day, and talking to her about mine.
Now, life is never so simple that eight or ten hours can be summarized in five minutes, but it's a quick summary. More importantly, it's a quick way to reconnect and fortify that healthy sense of togetherness.
HT to Michael Hyatt for this tip! Give it a Shot And let us know how it goes.
Or, maybe you've developed some quick-and-easy ways of connecting. We'd love to share those with other members of the OYF clan so please feel free to reach out on Facebook, Twitter or shoot us a note.
Please leave a comment below!
We hope you're having a great summer too!
I know we all can come out with some doozies in a rip-roarin' marital. However, one of the most important rules of fair fighting is: the threat of divorce is never on the table.
Divorce: Unjust if In Jest? So this is a short episode because we are on holidays! But we wanted to leave you with a good tidbit to chew over.
We've noticed a few different folks mentioning that their spouse threatened them with divorce, if they did or didn't do certain things. Now, we don't want to be too severe, but...
This one is simply unacceptable.
Marriage is a sacred, permanent covenant that should only ever be broken by the passing away of one's spouse. In the heat of an argument, some have thrown this question into the fray in a manipulative way as a scare tactic. That is never acceptable.
But what is surprising is the number of folks we've heard recently using this as a passing remark. "Oh, if you ever went out in public dressed like that, I'd divorce you!" Is that OK to say?
We say, "No!" Learn the Language of Distress Now we can certainly understand that there are some things we feel very strongly about. But to use the threat of divorce, even in a flippant way, is a small but unnecessary threat to the sanctity of the marriage bond.
There are other ways of expressing distress. Instead of creating a threat, give your spouse a window into how strongly impacted you are (or might be) by their choice. Try, "If you ever went out in public dressed like that, I'd feel like I was with my grandmother instead of my wife. Please change!" Stop and Think So this is just us asking you to stop and think before you speak.
Understand what is bothering you so severely.
Frame that into a language your spouse can receive without feeling threatened, and language that opens up your heart to him or her. We hope you enjoyed this! Remember, we'd love to hear from you. Please leave us a review on iTunes or send us your comments or a question for a future episode to questions@www.onlyyouforever.com.
And thanks for putting up with our mini-episode while we enjoy a family holiday in the Black Hills of South Dakota!
In your marriage, is sex more about quantity or quality?
One stereotype we always hear is that men just want it all the time and women do not. But the fact of the matter is, many factors come into play: body image, anxiety, menstrual cycles, social cues or influences, etc. So deriving meaning about the purpose of sexual intimacy from the frequency of sex is not always a great strategy.
Mutual Satisfaction Byers & Heinlein (1989) researched the initiation of sex in a marriage. What comes as no surprise is that they found men initiated more than women. But, they undid one cultural stereotype: men and women respond the same percentage of the time to those initiations.
Another thing they found was that if you experience greater sexual satisfaction in your marriage, there are more initiations. If you are less sexually satisfied, you are more likely to refuse an initiation.
All this to come to our first point – mutual satisfaction is one purpose for sex! Selfless-ness & Mutual Intimacy A key Bible passage that deals with the physical side of marriage is 1 Corinthians 7:3-5a, “The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.”
Some key points to see here:
In a marriage, we don’t have “rights” over our own bodies. We are responsible to yield mutually to one another. In fact, marriage and sex are both wonderful facilities to reveal selfishness in ourselves! We need to remember that we give up exclusive rights to “me” and share them with our spouse when we marry. Sex loses its meaning when I stop giving. Think of making love as a “giving” gesture and not a “getting” (ie, what I can get from it) gesture. Culture teaches that men, in particular, have a right to ejaculation. We need to think about rights differently. What we actually have the right to, is to mutually give or serve our spouse in the context of absolute equality. Holding a right to give, not get, is a paradigm shift that will bless your marriage. There is one huge assumption here, which may be an issue for some of you. This passage says nothing of procreation and by virtue of this silence, validates the truth that God made us sexual creatures not only for procreation but also for pleasure. That is one of the main points of sex: this very intense, very intimate, mutual intimacy and pleasure.
Frequency? So often people ask, “How often do married couples have sex?” We look for benchmarks sometimes and I think we’re really asking the question, not so much “What’s the point of sex” but rather “What’s the meaning of how frequently/infrequently we have sex?”
Greenblat (1983) found that in the first year of marriage, three-quarters of couples were having sex more than 2x/week; after 6 years that dropped to 1.5x per week. One consistent issue related to the decline in frequency was exhaustion. Life stages change and energy levels change with them!
But the decline was found not to be negative – people often reported physical intimacy as being more relaxed, and more focused on quality than quantity. Other types of intimacy were coming in as well.
Sprecher & Schwartz (1995) also studied the frequency of sex in married couples and found that frequency changes over the course of life. The greatest influencing factor in the decrease of physical intimacy is age. The second is marital happiness and then other factors, such as pregnancy and the presence of small children, come into play.
The point is that frequency should not dictate meaning. Rather, we need to have the meaning we give to our sexual intimacy speak to the natural frequency that will resu...
Sometimes it is just too scary to let someone else make the decisions. Other times the fear of losing someone is so powerful we won’t even let ourselves get close to them. These sound rather extreme but are more common in marriages than we might think. Let’s take a look at what triggers these fears.
Again, we want to acknowledge the research and wisdom of Dr. Weeks and Dr. Treat in examining these fears of intimacy. To recap from Part 1 and Part 2, fear is present in all of our lives to varying degrees and comes with many, many faces. How should we deal with fear? Acknowledge it, name it, and talk to your spouse about it. Always move towards it, not away from it, and you will disempower fear! Fear #5: Fear of Losing Control or Being Controlled Weeks and Treat state, that “Healthy relationships are based on mutual control. Partners share the power and control in the relationship.” That is our baseline and our assumption here, that there is some give and take to the control in the marriage. We see the balance in the Bible verse that precedes the classic text about marriage in Ephesians 5: “Submit yourselves to one another”.
Submission is not something to brow-beat your spouse with – it is something to be mutually given in marriage!
Alright, back to the Fear of Control after a little side rant there… :)
A spouse with this fear may actively resist or else passively give in to their spouse. This fear is actually very complex as a person may fear that getting too intimate will result in a loss of control of one’s life. There are two levels of meaning here:
Giving in or fighting control gives us a diversion from having to have deeper discussions that involve mutuality: which really is an intimate activity. This is why it is a fear of intimacy. By being controlled or by being controlling I can keep you out of my inner workings. Both are avoidance strategies. The deeper meaning is that losing control means feeling engulfed by the spouse. I lose myself, and my self-identity, if I am not in control. Often these folks will search (and this is paradoxical) for someone to complete themselves (a strong partner) but then need to recoil from that to preserve the little sense of self they do have. They don’t know who they are or what they want.
If you are in the first group, you will not let your guard down to let others know you. Often there is an assumption that the knowledge that comes from being vulnerable will be used against you. At the same time, you may not know how to assert yourself properly.
This often comes from parents who were over-controlling and did not promote competency and maturity. You may have been a child set up to take tasks beyond your capability and then had your parents stand back and watch you flop.
These marriages have a hard time with intimacy because it is more parent-child than equal to equal. It is regressive. It creates something that parallels what happened in your family of origin where your parents were over-controlling.
Again, the response is to own your stuff and then work through the task of piecing your identity together. It will be a challenging but wonderful journey. You will benefit from having a supportive spouse who respects boundaries and will lift you to that equal-to-equal place rather than buying into the parent-child pattern. Fear #6: Fear of Abandonment/Rejection In normal relationships, we all take this risk: the more we emotionally invest in our relationship, the more it hurts when the whole thing goes down in flames. Bring the fear of abandonment or rejection into this and it really complicates things.
If you have been hurt, you are wary to get too close too soon or to get close at all. If you have experienced traumatic abandonment (like death, divorce or desertion of a parent) and never had the opportunity to work through that, then it is even more severe. Or sometimes in adulthood, we can go through relational experiences that really build this fear up as part of our psyc...
If you've ever come up against some really strong feelings - either your own or someone else's - then you've probably felt yourself freaking out a little bit. Going into flight, fight or freeze mode! In Part 2, we talk about the fear of feelings and the fear of anger.
Fears of Intimacy As we talked about last week, we all have the fear of intimacy to some degree. Which one (or ones), and the severity, is mostly due to what we experienced in our families of origin (FOO). But the exciting thing is these do not have to be perpetuated through the course of our marriages!
We can overcome fears by acknowledging them, identifying them, and talking about them with a safe, caring spouse. As we quoted last week, “Perfect love casts out fear”. We do not get perfect love from our spouse all the time, but at least a healthy, sincere love will do a great deal to uproot and disempower these fears.
As we jump into Fear #3, we again want to acknowledge the work and research of Dr. Gerald Weeks and Dr. Stephen Treat in identifying these fears of intimacy. Both of these individuals have extensive experience helping marriages and it is more of their hard work that we are unpacking in today's episode. Fear #3: Fear of Feelings This fear has elements of the previous two fears (see OYF009), but this one is especially about feelings. Some spouses have learned to fear their feelings – all of them!
Rather than feel, these spouses would rather think. They hide behind rationality, denial, intellectualization, or just plain rigidity about what is “right”, and in so doing, stay detached in order to keep space between their spouse and their feelings.
Or, a person who fears their feelings may marry some histrionic, overly dramatic, to further take the pressure off them having to face their own feelings. If they have to deal with your junk, they don't have to do the hard work of working through their own.
If you grew up in a home with alcoholism, depression, child abuse, manic depressive behavior, or just sheer emotional unpredictability, then feelings were likely overwhelming. What do you do then? You shut the feelings down.
Or, perhaps your parents denied or dismissed your feelings. Maybe you even got punished for having some feelings. This leads to the belief that your spouse will discount your feelings, so you ignore them, minimize them, and keep them hidden. Fear #4: Fear of Anger There are two sides to the fear of anger. One is the fear of my anger, and the other is the fear of your anger. Fear of My Own Anger Sometimes a spouse brings deep anger and resentment to the marriage. A classic example of this is in parentified children. These folks were asked to assume responsibility far beyond their capacity when they were children. Often they had to care for a parent – sometimes from very legitimate situations, or on the sadder end of the spectrum, a child with alcoholic parents having to be hyper-vigilant that a drunk, the smoking parent didn't pass out with a half-smoked cigarette and set the house on fire.
These children typically either never had the opportunity, or were never allowed, to express feelings of anger and this builds up over time. In marriage, they become afraid of all that coming out uncontrollably so they keep their distance from others, including their spouse.
Or if a person has grown up in a very angry home and witnessed spousal abuse or experienced child abuse, this is also a common source of the fear of anger because they never want to repeat what they saw – being done in anger.
At the other end of the spectrum, a person may have grown up in a home devoid of anger so have the belief that anger is unacceptable or bad or destructive and so on.
And an example we can all relate to, regardless of our FOO: Maybe I just don't have the skills to deal with anger so I just pent it up over time. Then BOOM it all comes out uncontrollably – and “Oh no, I have to make sure that never happens again.
When you hesitate and find yourself stopping just before sharing something very personal with your spouse, how do you make sense of that? Shouldn’t we be able to share everything with our soul mate?
Fear of Intimacy, Part 1 We all bring some fears to our relationship. Usually, one or more of the six fears of intimacy we’re going to talk about for the next few weeks. So, if you really like digging deep into your stuff, you’ll find this mini-series fascinating!
Before we dive right in, let’s think about fear for a few moments. How do we deal with fear? Usually, we think that avoiding fear takes us away from that fear. But that doesn’t work!
Fear is a valid, normal response in the human body and so avoiding or ignoring fear is invalidating what is real and what is normal. When we acknowledge our fear, talk about our fear, and share our fear then we actually end up disempowering it.
Our fear of fear is often stronger than our fear! Fear Impedes Intimacy Descutner and Thelen (1991) found that fear of intimacy is negatively related to comfort with emotional closeness and relationship satisfaction(as my fear of intimacy goes up, my comfort with emotional closeness and my relationship satisfaction goes down) and positively related to loneliness and trait anxiety (as the fear of intimacy goes up, loneliness and trait anxiety increases).
A Visualization of the Research by Descutner & Thelen (1991)
When we move closer to our fear through recognizing, acknowledging and naming it then we actually begin to see that the fear (which we feared) is not as big, nor as powerful, nor as overwhelming as we thought.
This reality is underlined in a brilliant Bible verse in Proverbs 29:25: “The fear of man lays a snare”. So often our fear of others, or our own fears, actually snare us – trap us. In the marriage context, fears of intimacy hold us back (and even trap us) from experiencing deeper intimacy.
Caleb had a funny personal story as a good example of the power of subconscious fear and the greater power of naming it. It’s not in the marriage context at all, but it really illustrates how identifying fear and moving towards it totally takes its power away: For years of my life (including adult years), I had this recurring nightmare of finding myself suddenly aware that I was out in public with no pants on. I was always a a little boy in these dreams and I awoke from them with incredible feelings of shame.
Well, sometime in the mid 2000’s, I remembered that in Grade 3 I was in a brand new school, and it was my first year there, and I was late coming out of the change room for gym class. I was in rush, and I had gone in and got changed as quick as I could. I ran out in to the gymnasium , in front of my whole class… in my gym shirt, runners, and tighty-whitey’s! The whole class laughed at me. There's enough shame associated with that memory that I remember it not from my perspective, but as if I was watching myself do this (in the psych world we call this a dissociation).
I forgot about that for years, but would regularly have these nightmares at least a few times a year. When I remembered the memory and shared it with Verlynda and some friends, I stopped having the dream. Talking about it undermined the power of that fear. Again: naming it and telling a few people I trusted about it completely disempowered this deeper subconscious mini-trauma and took the nightmares away. A funny story, but definitely shows the difference in results between avoiding our fears and facing them!
The following six fears (2 this week, more to follow) are based on the research of Dr. Gerald Weeks, Chair of the Department of Counseling at the University of Nevada, and Dr. Stephen Treat, Director and CEO of the Penn Council for Relationship and an Instructor in Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. Fear #1 – Fear of Exposure When we first start dating, we’re just a couple of plasticky Facebook profiles.
So, if you’ve been married more than a week, you know there’s a difference between intimacy and sex. You can have either one without the other, but together, it is an incredible experience!
What is Fully Engaged Sex? Fully engaged sex is when both spouses are fully present and there is a real sense of connection. It is the difference between just doing it and actually bonding, between having sex and making love. There is a lot that goes into a real sense of connection during sex, but one thing that we want to focus on here is eyes-open sex.
Eyes open sex is really emphasized by Dr. David Schnarch. He is a certified sex therapist who has run hundreds of workshops and surveyed thousands of people about sex. Here are some statistics from his surveys:
7.5% of couples never have sex 32% never make eye contact during sex 42% sometimes make eye contact during sex 18.5% actually sometimes have orgasms while looking into each other's eyes.
These statistics really raise the question about how engaged we are during sex. Why are we not more intimate? Connection During Intimacy Connection is what deepens intimacy. It happens on a number of levels, but if you have your eyes open and you’re in touch with each other rather than each being lost in your own private pleasure, that’s sex on a more intimate level.
The very opposite of connected a connected couple are ones who are bored and lazy during sex. They’re just doing their “marital obligations” and underneath they’re isolated and filled with their own concerns or insecurities. Their bodies are there, but they are not both fully present and fully engaged.
Mosher, in The Journal of Sex Research (1980) speaks about disengaged versus engaged sex like this: When sexual trance is the preferred pathway of involvement, the setting requires freedom from distractions, the mood is relaxed and receptive, sexual techniques emphasize repetitive, sensual pacing, the sexual style is passive and inwardly oriented, fantasies are scriptless sensory images, and sex is conceived to be an altered state of consciousness or a trip that leads to intense absorption into sensation and orgasm with faded consciousness in which the person is transported. When engagement with the sex partner programs the sexual contact episode, then the mood and setting are romantic reminders of the love bond, the sexual techniques emphasize kissing, cuddling, and face-to-face contact, the sexual style is affectionate and mutually pleasuring, the fantasies are romantic, sex is conceived to be a loving merger, and orgasms are flowing with a loss of the self in a loving union. The first part of that long technical paragraph speaks about disengaged sex where each spouse is focused completely inward. The second half speaks of a union where the couple is engaged. In both situations, people had an orgasm and had sex, but the levels of intimacy are at an entirely different level.
A couple engaged while lovemaking is like the sexual implications of the Biblical statement about marriage that “they two shall be one flesh”. Rather than 1+1=2, we want 1+1 to equal 1!! Eyes-Open Sex: Touching Versus Feeling You can do all the right moves and have great sexual technique, but if you’re not actually present and making contact with her, you’re not feeling her and you’re not experiencing your sexuality as intimacy. Intensity? Probably. Intimacy? Not so much.
Again, Schnarch emphasizes intimacy. We can touch without feeling: this might be called sex but it is not intimate. We may be regularly orgasmic but still not make contact. Closing your eyes, focusing on the sensations in your body, working on technique, making it look right and achieving orgasm can actually all be ways of avoiding engagement.
The goal is connection! Learning to engage more deeply through eyes-open sex is a great week to deepen that connection How Can We Increase This Connection? Slow things down right from the start.
Engage in creative, eyes-open foreplay.
We started with the subject of in-laws in Episode 6 and learned that there are some powerful but subtle psychological mechanisms that can come into play in our relationships with our in-laws. The more we are aware of these things and of our own "stuff", the better equipped we are to maintain a healthy relationship with the new set of parents and siblings that usually come with marriage. Today, we finish our discussion before heading over to a fascinating question from a member of the OYF clan.
A Quick Review In summary, in Episode #6, we discussed the following dynamics based on some great research found in the Journal of Family Therapy:
Jealousy: for time, affection and attention Competition: comparison and expectations Transference: stuff missing in my family that I look for, or expect in yours, without (perhaps) even realizing I'm doing so. Displacement: getting upset with the in-laws because that's easier than getting made at my spouse, or even my own parents.
We want to affirm again the need to honour our parents and yet we hope that by opening up these areas of struggle that it'll help normalize some of the challenges of being in a relationship with our in-laws. In-laws can be a major marital issue, which is supported by research. In the Journal Of Marriage and Family (2004), Bryan, Conger & Meehan concluded the following: Even in long-term marriages, conflicts in extended family relations will erode marital stability, satisfaction and commitment over time. Those in-law conflicts can actually wear away at the marriage bond and that is why we want you to have some tools and ideas about how to approach these issues so that this can be a point of resilience in your marriage.
Going back to the research from the Journal of Family Therapy, let's move on! 5. Poor Boundary Regulation Every family is different, and flexibility is a huge asset in creating a successful marriage. That flexibility also needs to be extended to our in-laws as we all have our own expectations of what the relationship should look like. Whether it be family rituals, levels of parental involvement, or whatever, each one of us has an idea of how things should work out. When couples merge, some of those differences may feel like violations because we expect one thing and reality is another. That's where boundary regulation comes in - the couple needs to support each other, have good communication, be together and realize that there are some differences that they'll need to navigate their way through.
To emphasize again, the couple needs to be together at all times. A parent and child can never divorce, but a married couple can, so must do everything they can to preserve that bond. If the parents have overstepped a boundary, the couple (even if one thinks their spouse is in the wrong) needs to be together in the moment but also needs to sort out later (in private) what went on. Try to unpack things and look at it from the other family's point of view. An apology may be needed, so be big enough to apologize if you were at fault!
If you think about it, the weird part about in-laws is that all of a sudden there's a close, familial connection with people who are pretty much strangers. Those people have a 20 or 30-year relationship with your spouse, and you're now received into this family with the same position but none of the history. We need to define those boundaries and how the relationship is going to look in a way that supports the marriage bond first and respect and honours the parents second. 6. Discrepant Role Expectations What if, for their first baby, the husband has been looking forward to being Awesome Dad #1. He takes time off work, reads all the same baby books Mom does. He is committed to sharing the infant parenting 100% - for everything but the breastfeeding, things will be 50/50. The day after they get home from the hospital, the wife's Mom shows up, and she thinks she's the 50% the husband was planning to be.
I was at a magic show, when after one particularly amazing trick, someone screamed out, “Wow, how did you do that?” “I would tell you”, answered the magician predictably, “but then I’d have to kill you.” After a moment’s pause, the same voice yelled back “Can you tell my mother in law?”
In-laws Are Special! Even though it would be impossible to host an episode about in-laws without a little off-the-cuff humour, we do want to acknowledge that parents are always to be given honour. Having said that, we recognize that in-law issues – both parent to offspring and offspring to parent – can be a really hot topic for many marriages!
The Journal of Family Therapy published an article called “The Problem With In-Laws” (2003). They identified six common areas where issues arise in Western societies with in-laws. They are:
Jealousy Competition Transference Displacement Poor boundary regulation and Discrepant role expectations
These are not all words we use commonly every day so we will unpack them a little below!
A note to folks from other cultures that follow our show: you may have to take what we’re going to talk about and evaluate if it fits your culture. At the very least, this might be an interesting insight into how things happen in the idealized world of North America.
Regardless of culture, the guiding principle here from the ancient wisdom of the Bible is that a husband shall leave his father and mother and cleave (cling, unite) unto his wife (Genesis 2). This implies there is a clear separation that comes into the parental relationship and then a joining in the marriage relationship. 1. Jealousy When you get married, your loyalty changes from your parents to your spouse. Time, attention and affection get re-directed to the spouse from the parents which may make the parents jealous. The spouse may also get jealous is he/she feels that the parents-in-law are still getting a larger portion of the attention.
To further complicate things, a spouse may actually feel like they’re betraying their parents to some extent when they leave home. There may be grief, but the couple needs to build their own bond to compensate.
Realize that most in-laws want the best for your marriage. Usually, parents are not out to thwart a relationship but want their child and spouse to be happy. It is each individual coming to the new relationship with their own expectations of what that should look like that causes conflicting tensions. 2. Competition (or Comparison) It is so easy to fall into the trap of comparing ourselves with others. That is no different in relationships than it is with anything else.
We can bring a lot of expectations into our marriage about what it means to be a good daughter-in-law (DIL) or son-in-law (SIL) and even compare ourselves with our siblings as to who is doing a better job as an in-law.
We may also compare ourselves to our spouse's parents. For example, a husband may compare the house that he has provided for his wife with the house she lived in with her parents and wonder if he measures up.
It’s also easy to feel like we need to compete for the amount of time devoted to each relationship. How can we diffuse the competition? We need to manage our boundaries – put your spouse first and your parents second. As a spouse, we need to voice our concerns to our marriage partner if we feel left out. Talk about it and try to find ways where you can still feel connected with the parents but are not taking time away from your spouse. Rather than come at it with an “either-or” attitude (competition) try to find a “both-and” solution. 3. Transference Transference is looking to your family (my in-laws) to provide something that was lacking in my family or fulfill the role of my parents. It may not even be a recognized need, but it is in the subconscious as a deep desire.
For example, if one family of origin (FOO) was not very good nurturing, that spouse may need his/her in-laws to provide that nurturing.
We all know that one sure-fire way to get cancer is by smoking cigarettes. What if there was one thing that is cancerous to marriage? Today we’re going to look at one feeling that could destroy your marriage and what we can do to defend ourselves against this.
What is this one thing? You might think, “Really? One thing? Marriages break up for a lot of reasons!”
Well, Dr. John Gottman has identified that the number one factor identified in marriage break ups is contempt. What does contempt look like? Well, it might look like sarcasm, cynicism, name-calling, eye-rolling, sneering, mockery, hostile humor. You can even see it on a persons face sometimes when they lift a corner or pull back the side of their mouth.
Contempt increases conflict and comes from long-simmering negative thoughts. It is literally unhealthy: Couples who are contemptuous of each other are more likely to suffer from infectious illnesses.
A great example of contempt in a marriage is found in the history of the Bible in the story of Michal, one of the wives of King David. When David went into exile, he left Michal behind, and while exiled got more wives. Think about it, she’s left behind trying to explain to people why he didn’t take her with him. In the scene where David returns (2 Samuel 6) and is celebrating victory, Michal sees his excitement and as soon as they meet, she cuts him down. She mocks him with sarcasm, which is contempt.
Contempt conveys disgust and anger.
The story actually ends by saying she had no children to the day of her death. While the marriage stayed intact as an institution, obviously they were so done with each other there was no sexual intimacy, never mind emotional.
Contempt is lethal to a marriage. Wives: Listen Up! While nobody deserves to be treated contemptuously, there is a gender difference regarding the impact of contempt on the marriage bond: contempt from a wife is more serious than contempt from a husband. Men are hard-wired for respect – they need that. Individuals who doubt themselves underestimate the strength of their partner’s love. I.e., disrespect means you don’t love me. What Can We Do? If you’re reading this, or have listened to our show, and are like “OH NO! Our marriage is toast…”, make changes now.
Cultivate what Dr. Gottman calls a “culture of praise and admiration”. You can do this by:
Expressing genuine appreciation. We talked about this in more detail in Episode 4 Being focused on what your spouse is adding to your life (not taking for granted) Touching your partner verbally and physically every day in an affectionate manner.
This is very deliberate – you can’t just wing it! Don’t be a statistic, combat contempt today! Q&A Section Mark asked: “It seems a good marriage, as we have observed, goes through different stages of growth. Are these common to all marriages? Can they be delineated? What hinders or halts progression? What enhances progression?
Listen to this episode to hear the answer!
Have you ever caught your spouse doing something right? Haha, that’s right: so often we’re quick to get at each other when things don’t go well. It’s pretty easy to get that criticism monkey on your back but really hard to get it off. Today we’re going to work on the skill of expressing appreciation in your marriage.
Reason 1: You’ll Enjoy Your Marriage More Showing appreciation goes both ways. A study published by Busby, Holman and Neihuis in 2009 showed that couples in which both spouses perceived the other’s personality as more affable (friendly, or good-natured) then their own experienced more positive relationship outcomes.
By force of habit, we can see the positives more than the negatives or vice versa.
Dr. John Gottman states, “We have learned that couples rarely improve their marriages by trying to change each other. Rather, couples find happiness by focusing on each other’s positive attributes.”
Add to that focus by proactively emphasizing the positive!
The Bible says “Therefore encourage one another and build one another up” (1 Thess 5:11). Reason 2: You’ll Get More of What You Express Appreciation For It’s a natural desire, in a healthy marriage, to want to please your spouse. When we hear appreciation, we are learning what pleases the other person. This then becomes a note-to-self of how to bring more positivity into the relationship in the future, even if it’s more in the subconscious! Reason 3: Appreciation Reinforces the Emotional Bond Between You Expressing appreciation is really just another way to say, “I love you!”
If you loathe someone, you know how hard it is to even find one positive thing to say about that person. On the other hand, if you appreciate someone, giving voice to those positive affirmations will reinforce the emotional bond.
As humans, we know that the people who love us appreciate us. So it’s a way of saying, “I love you” and strengthening your marriage. Reason 4: Appreciation is a Signal That You’re Vested in the Relationship Dr. John Gottman’s research has shown that healthy marriages have five positive interactions for every negative interaction. Unhealthy marriages have a ratio of 0.8 to 1. Being positive half the time doesn’t cut it! Your positivity needs to far overwhelm your negativity.
Appreciation is one of many ways to create positive interactions. But beyond what you say to express it, there is the underlying affirmation that you’re committed to this relationship, you’re investing in it, you’re building it and you’re wanting it to grow! Words of appreciation “give grace to those who hear” (Ephesians 4:29) so it builds resilience into the marriage bond for that 1 time (for at least every five) in which we stumble and say something that hurts our spouse.
You can’t express appreciation and not want all that good stuff to happen. So it’s a powerful signal to your spouse of how meaningful the relationship is to you. Reason 5: It’s Going to Force You to Learn to Accept Appreciation Ironically, we’re often better at giving appreciation than receiving, which is good, but it’s actually just as important that we learn to receive it as well. Perhaps this is more directed at our female listeners - Caleb commented that “the number of successful, have-it-together, competent moms or wives that have expressed a profound lack of self-confidence blows my mind.” Our appeal to you is, learn to receive your husband’s appreciation!
What does it mean to receive appreciation? Bring it into your heart! See the sincerity in your eyes, hear the genuineness in his voice and believe what he’s saying! Internalize it, accept it as true!
When he says: “You look great in that outfit!” Don’t say “Yeah, but I feel fat…” “That was an awesome supper!” Don’t say “Well, I wish I could make it like your mom.” “You’re a good mommy!” Don’t say “Sometimes I feel like such a failure.” Instead, learn to say thank you! and tuck that little appreciation away in your heart! The goal is not pride,
Do you ever wonder why your wife just isn’t getting on board with your decisions? Whatever your idea or plan was, it made perfect sense. But your wife isn’t going along with it--and in fact may even be pulling the other direction! This podcast is about one thing we husbands must learn to do well in order to be together as a couple on our decisions.
Receiving Influence Receiving Influence is something we must learn to do well. It simply means that the husband makes himself open to persuasion from his wife. This is something that marriage researcher, Dr. John Gottman, emphasizes as a critical trait of healthy marriages.
It’s the opposite of being stubborn or domineering and it is particularly important that the husband pays close attention to this. Marriage is a great tool to help us become less selfish. It is sometimes hard to be open to our spouse’s influence and that might be seen in comments where we dismiss their input by saying something like, “Nonsense, what are you talking about? That’s ridiculous!” Or even more subtle remarks like “It’s not that big a deal…” or “I’m sorry, but someone had to make a decision”.
These types of statements tell one's wife that I'm not willing to receive her influence. Why is it Important to Receive Influence? Not being open leads your spouse to become angry and frustrated. That often leads to contempt and criticism: both of which are highly corrosive in a marriage. It leaves the other spouse feeling disrespected and erodes a sense of us, creating two “me” spouses.
Ephesians 5:28 says “Husbands love their wives as their own bodies”. This really puts the husband under obligation to serve his wife’s needs as much as his own. When you do a good job of receiving influence, you're signaling your wife that you're recognizing here presence, worth, feelings, and opinions. How Do I Get Better at Receiving Influence? Dr. John Gottman calls it the “Aikido principle”. It’s a rule from Japenese martial arts: you must yield to your opponent in order to win. You become more powerful by sharing your power with your spouse.
Realize it’s not about win or lose. It’s about understanding each other and honouring each other by recognizing different perspectives. Try a different point of view. Instead of sitting across the table from each other on an issue, try shifting your thinking so that you’re together looking at the same problem. Don’t let the problem come between you, but be united against the problem.
Make this:
Become this:
See the difference? You may even find it helpful to physically move closer towards and beside each other when discussing major decisions. Instead of you-me-problem, it becomes us-problem.
Part of the idea here is learning to understand each other and to honour different perspectives. When we approach a major decision together, we have the opportunity to both maintain our own self-esteem and also to build understanding. So What Can I Say to Let Her Know I Hear Her? Receiving influence is a combination of perspective and communication skills. We've addressed the perspective issue above. As far as communication skills go, try some of these answers next time:
That’s interesting. Help me understand where you’re coming from a little better. It seems like this is really important to you. How is it important? It seems like you’re scared of something here. Am I right? What is causing you fear? (Go straight to empathy) Wow, I can certainly see how that would be frustrating for you.
See how these are inviting your wife closer rather than pushing her away? This tells her you are honouring the huge role that she plays in your life. Q&A Section Question from someone identifying herself as "JustChill": Why doesn’t my husband consult me when making plans for us? For example, he invited friends over for dinner without asking me and only informed me less an hour before they arrived. He invited my parents out to dinner by asking them without even telling me of his intentions.
In our Internet world of picture-perfect mommy bloggers, Facebook updates about how cute our toddler’s latest saying was, and family-fun photos on Instagram, there’s a lot of pressure to be the perfect mom. But: what if all the mommy-glamour could become the ruin of your marriage? Today’s episode is about prioritizing marriage over parenting.
Should I Focus on My Marriage Or My Kids? The title comes from Salvador Minuchin (possibly! Caleb wasn't sure if his memory was working right here), the father of Family Systems Therapy who, when dealing with a dysfunctional family turned and asked the mother when she divorced her husband and married her kids. That is, why did she abandon her marriage relationship and focus completely on her children?
We've had some great advice over the years and this issue was a part of that. Advice was given to Verlynda at a baby shower before she had her first child, You were a wife before you were a mother – don’t forget that. And a piece of advice Caleb was given: The best gift you can give your children is to love their mother. This is a common issue. William Farley, in Gospel-Powered Parenting, points out the risk of child idolatry in our culture and says the Puritans actually warned against loving our children too much. Farley says we need to love God more than our children, which ultimately is better for the kids as well and so we unpacked this idea further in the show.
The research also supports the idea that prioritizing the marriage overparenting was better for both the couple and the children. Even at the start of child-rearing, a study by O’Brien and Payton in the Journal of Family Psychology, 2002: found that a higher perceived difficulty with parenting was related to lower levels of initial marital intimacy. So you can see how they observed that marital intimacy makes parenting even feel easier. The Baby-will-save-our-marriage Trick is Probably a Bad Idea You want your baby to land right in the middle of a secure emotional bond between dad and mom, not into a war zone!
Our proposition is that you give more to your kids through good ‘husbanding’ or good ‘wifing’ than through good parenting because the second flows most effectively from a solid marital foundation.
This was reinforced by Erel and Burman (1995) who did a meta-analysis (a study of other researcher's work) of 68 studies examining relationships between marital quality and parenting. They found two conclusions:
Positive marital relationship=positive parenting relationship Parents invest more deeply in their children when there are problems in the marriage.
Compensating for problems in the marriage by turning to the kids is the wrong approach!
In the Scriptures, the relationship that God chose to be the one institution that would symbolize his love for the church is that of marriage, not parenting. So loving our spouse well preaches the Gospel of God's love to our kids and to others. Our children should be attracted to God and his love, seen in the gospel, by virtue of what they see in a husband's love for his wife.
The same values are evident in what the Journal of Family and Psychology, 2004 stated, that kids (5-6 yr olds) adjust to school better when Dad and Mom are in love with each other. Again, parental love fortifies the children, makes them feel more secure and gives them more confidence to face new life experiences.
The Handbook of Parenting, Volume 4 “Social Conditions and Applied Parenting” reviews a lot of studies. They conclude “happily married parents are more sensitive, responsive, warm and affectionate toward their children…the marital relationship appears to serve as a primary source of support for parenting.” It also stated, “having skills and knowledge is not sufficient for competent parenting if marital tensions and conflict undermine the co-parenting alliance.”
To sum up: you will be more successful in creating happier children by focusing on your spouse. On the other hand,
The Origins of OnlyYouForever: Only You Forever is actually a love song… written by Caleb for Verlynda.
It was written on a highway in Montana while we drove into the sunset (insert "happy memories" sigh here) on the way to a family vacation in Yellowstone. We've posted a full copy of the Only You Forever lyrics written by Caleb.
The Goal of OnlyYouForever Our taglines state that our purpose is “to build thriving, passionate marriages”. Just because you married the perfect someone doesn’t guarantee marital bliss! Marriage is something that needs to be worked on whether you’ve had a great marriage so far or have hit a really hard place or are somewhere in between there.
OnlyYouForever will give you the tools to rock your marriage and make it awesome!
As your hosts, we are committed to delivering “no fluff” content. We are intentional, focused, and cut to the point. We won’t waste your time with long, blathering episodes!
Also, no part of marriage is too sacred or taboo to be discussed. But we want to talk about the part of marriage that matters to you. Share your burning questions and curiosities about marriage by using our Speakpipe service or our Questions form. Your Hosts Caleb has a Master of Arts in Marriage and Family Therapy and is a Registered Clinical Counsellor. He’s got a lovely bald head which his wife and daughters love!
Verlynda has a heart for others which is huge. She is definitely the extrovert in the marriage, and Caleb appreciates her for her practicality and insight.
As an aside, we shared a chuckle over a comment in a great book. The book deals with, amidst other things, the subject of birth order. It's called Family Ties That Bind by Richardson.
This book quotes, regarding the youngest daughter in a family (which Verlynda is), that “her poorest choice of husband is usually the youngest brother of brothers [which Caleb is]…neither of them want to be responsible for running a household or parenting”.
While this book has a lot of great information, we are glad to be at least one exception to this rule! The Content of the OnlyYouForever Podcast We will base the show on a blend of ancient wisdom and current research. Caleb is an avid researcher and wants to include a lot of that hard work that has been done in the field of couple dynamics. Our faith is also important to us so we will speak out of a Christian, Biblically-informed worldview.
So, that’s how OnlyYouForever got started, what we hope to accomplish and little about ourselves! We're so happy that you've visited our website and we hope that you'll subscribe to our email list to stay up to date on our latest episodes.
Remember, your real-life marriage questions are important! Others will be blessed when you send them in and they hear them answered on our podcast. You can send in your marriage questions using our Speakpipe service or our Q&A form.
Image courtesy of jakeandlindsay under the Creative Commons license.