The Missing Piece To Saving Your Broken Marriage

You’ve probably heard the classic advice: "If you want to save your marriage, you have to work on yourself." But what if that’s only half the truth?

In this video, Dr. Kimberly Beam Holmes and Marriage Helper COO Marcos Silva reveal why focusing purely on self-improvement can actually be a trap that pushes your spouse further away. While working on your PIES (Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, and Spiritual attraction) is a vital first step, doing it solely for yourself—or solely to manipulate your spouse's reaction—will leave you stuck.

The real secret to saving a broken marriage isn't just about becoming the best version of yourself. It's about learning how to love differently, navigating the "gray area," and changing the way you actually show up for your spouse.

- Take the FREE "Show Up Snapshot" Assessment: Discover where you are at risk of burning out and where you have untapped potential to show up stronger for the people you love. [https://bit.ly/4cdIBzH]

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Transcript

The Limits Of Self-Work

Introducing PIES And Its Pitfalls

Faith, Hope, And Love Reframed

Showing Up Versus Showing Off

Inputs And Outputs Of PIES

SPEAKER_01 0:00

If you want to save your marriage, you have to work on yourself. You've probably heard this. In fact, you may have even heard me say this. This is something that is so easy to say, but if I'm going to be completely honest with you, it's not the whole entire truth. Focusing on self-improvement is the easiest thing that you can do because you get to control you. You get to focus on what you need to do. The only thing that you can actually control in any relationship is yourself. It's what you do, it's how you show up. However, if all you do is focus on you becoming the best version of you and self-improving, then it's not everything you actually need in order to save your marriage. My name is Dr. Kimberly Beam Holmes. And as I said, I've been talking about this concept of pies, working on yourself physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually for a decade. In fact, it's one of the favorite things that I get to talk about and something that I'm incredibly passionate about. And so you may be thinking, what are you actually trying to tell me here today? I've become, over the past several years, increasingly convicted by one very important thing. It is important to have hope for your marriage. It's important to work on yourself. All of these things are true. All of these things are good. However, if you don't actually learn how to love and how to change the way that you love your spouse, then your marriage won't be able to fully be saved, to actually be saved. Self-improvement can only take you so far. And in fact, one of the huge pitfalls about self-improvement is just that. If I'm only focused on what makes me happy, if I'm only focused on doing the things that give me joy, that give me life, well, guess what? I have forgotten about the other half, about my other half, about my husband, about maybe what he needs, how I need to show up for him. The pies, self-improvement, focusing on yourself while in many cases life-giving, and in many cases it can save yourself 100%. It also has the potential downfall of ending up making us more selfish, more self-centered, and doing things that ultimately end up pushing our spouse further away because we aren't doing the right things. So what then can we do? I still believe that the pies are an incredibly important focus point for us. I believe that it's a powerful framework. But one of my favorite books says that three things, when all things go to hell, three things remain: faith, hope, and love. One of the things that we teach you at Marriage Helper is having faith and trusting a process, is having hope in understanding that your future can be better than your past. And hope is two things. It's having a vision of how the future can be better and a plan of how to get there. We do a great job of teaching you that here at Marriage Helper, but the most important one is love. Marriages aren't saved on faith and hope. Marriages are saved when we learn how to love differently. And yes, the only thing we can control is ourselves. So we still have to be able to balance this dichotomy, live in this tension of how can I control me, knowing that's the only thing I can do, knowing I can't force my husband to love me again, knowing I can't force my wife to come back to me, how can I control me while also keeping in tension with that, the fact that I need to love my spouse better, differently, in a more holistic way. It's all about the way you show up. Historically, when we have talked about the pies, we've talked about physically work on becoming the best that you can be. Look the best that you can. Intellectually, you want to be able to have conversations with your spouse to where you're not just talking about things that frustrate you, but you're able to engage with each other on a topic and on a level that is more like your friends. You have similar hobbies, similar things you can talk about. Emotionally, it's about evoking emotions within your spouse that they enjoy feeling. Spiritually, it's about living in line with your beliefs and values. All of these are surface level, how we can work on our pies, but I believe that we can take it one step deeper and think about the pies in terms of inputs and in terms of outputs. Now, I don't have time to go into all of that today, but I did release two things that I want to share with you. First of all, I did a complete YouTube video that we'll link to in the show notes as well as the chat where I talk about these inputs in depth. There are actually four things that you can do for each area of your pies. Physically, there's four inputs. There are four specific things that you can do in order for you to have the best outputs, which is the way other people experience you. There's four inputs for intellectually. There's four inputs for emotionally, four inputs for spiritually. These are things that you can do with the ultimate goal of understanding that we do these things not to just make ourselves happier, but because it allows us to show up better, to have better influence in our lives and in our relationships, to have deeper relationships, to have more intimate relationships with our spouse, with our kids, to help them see and feel seen and see that we fully love them. It's not just about working on ourselves for the heck of it. It's about working on ourselves because it changes the way that we show up. So the second thing that I want to offer you is a free assessment. I'm calling it the show up snapshot. We're also linking to that in the show notes and in the chat. It's eight simple questions, very top level, high level, asking you how are you currently working on yourself physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually? And how are you currently showing up in those areas of your life? It's a completely free assessment. It's very, it'll show you kind of top level, high level, where you are at risk of certain areas being fractured, where you're at risk of certain areas burning out, or maybe where there's untapped potential for you, physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, where you're pouring into yourself and you have the capacity there to actually show up stronger in those different areas, not just because of you, but because it makes a difference for the people you love, including your spouse. There's a lot of people out there right now saying the best thing you can do to save your marriage is just work on you. That's only a part of the puzzle, but it's not the complete solution because it's missing one of the most important things. I'm joined here today with Marcos Silva. Marcos is our COO here at Marriage Helper, but even before that, he was a client. His marriage was saved through Marriage Helper. He and his wife are a part of our team. And I believe that Marcos, maybe more than most people, understands the impact of what I'm saying about how working on your pies is great, but it's not the complete answer when it comes to fully saving your marriage.

SPEAKER_00 7:56

Well, first of all, thank you for having me. Um hi everyone. Yes, I went through the program about eight years ago. I was when some of you guys are now. Um and there are a couple things with pies that I call them traps, I call them uh danger zones. Uh, and I tell when I was coaching, I tell everybody to walk the gray area in between, which is basically um you can start working pies for yourself and just be so little focused on your development that you start becoming selfish, like uh Kimberly pointed out. And then the other part is working on pies in order to see how your spouse react, and then you you start getting so focused on their reactions that you forget to do pies for you. Um and pies by itself is it is not enough. You can wear pies all your life, but you can still push your spouse away by the way you show up, by the way you you react. Um, because m you know, besides pies is choosing what you say, choosing what you uh you not say, choosing how you react to what the other person says. Um there are very things on that gray area that you have to navigate and um and you have to add to your pies principle.

SPEAKER_01 9:15

Absolutely.