How To Stop Your Spouse From Leaving... Stop Trying

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If your spouse is leaving, your instinct is to stop them.

Block the exit.
Monitor their phone.
Guilt them into staying.

That doesn't work.

In this video, Marriage Helper coach Nathan shares a story about his daughter Valerie, and how it perfectly illustrates what most people get wrong when trying to save their marriage.

You're focused on the exterior pull.

The other person. The new life. The thing pulling them away.

But you can't control that.

What you can control is what's happening inside the marriage.

Stop chasing the thing that's pulling them out.

Start bringing the pull back in.

Nathan walks through a real client story. A woman whose husband was living overseas and showing signs he wasn't coming back. She was snooping, pain shopping, and letting her frustration poison every interaction.

Then she made a shift.

She stopped obsessing over what she couldn't change and started becoming the woman her husband married.

Months later? He was back in the States. Back in the house. And sitting next to her at a Marriage Helper Workshop.

That's what happens when you bring the pull inside.

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Transcript

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Stop Chasing Your Spouse

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you're still trying to keep your spouse from leaving, here's why you should stop.

A Child Escapes Into The Street

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hi, my name's Nathan. I'm a marriage helper coach and a workshop leader, and I was recently coming home with my wife from a grocery trip. When we entered into the neighborhood, we saw in the distance a little girl wandering the streets alone. I casually turned to my wife and said, What kind of irresponsible parent would allow their little daughter to wander off by herself? As we got closer, we realized that this was not just any little girl. This was our five-year-old daughter, Valerie. In a panic, we pulled up next to her, got out of the car to rescue her. So after we got Valerie in the car, I was talking to my wife about what in the world just happened. It had only been 20 minutes. We do this all the time. We finally made it inside the house and the investigation began, starting by lining up our kids in the living room and grilling them one by one, starting with our oldest, a teenager who's used to watching his siblings all the time. What went wrong? How did Valerie escape? He insisted he just left her in the room. When I asked all the other kids what they were doing and where they were, they insisted they had just been in the house. And their stories were kind of checking out. Because as me and my wife started looking through the house, we started to realize that everything in the home was exactly how we left it. The doors were locked, the garage was down. I thought to myself, something isn't right here. So I went outside to investigate, and as I turned the corner of my house, I caught my daughter Valerie in the act. She was escaping through the window of her room, something she'd never done before.

Interior Pulls Versus Exterior Pulls

SPEAKER_00 1:47

You know, something that you might want to know about Valerie is that she has autism. She's also nonverbal, meaning she can't really talk to us, and she has extreme ADHD, which means her mind is going a million miles a minute, always looking for the next thing to stimulate her brain. And one of the things that stimulates her most is water. Kind of like a swimming pool. We wonder if maybe what she was looking for is what we call an exterior pull. This is how it kind of relates to marriage. When we talk about pulls at marriage helper, we talk about things that elicit positive emotion. There are things inside the marriage that a spouse can do that can make their partner feel positive emotions. We call that an interior pull. And then we also have what we call exterior pulls, things outside the marriage that call to our attention, that beckon for our imagination. And as we go pursue that exterior pull, we end up moving away from our marriage. In this case, Valerie was exploring and pursuing an exterior pull. It's kind of hot out here. Let's go inside.

Why Policing The Exterior Fails

SPEAKER_00 3:04

When it comes to saving a marriage, what most people get wrong is they start by trying to minimize the exterior pull. It can look a number of ways. Like in the case of an affair, it's like begging your spouse to not go to that person, snooping on their Facebook page, trying to guilt them in to stop what they're doing. None of that works. That kind of behavior is the same thing that my wife and I were trying to do with Valerie. Let's close the doors, make sure they're locked, shut the garage, keep her teenage brother in guard so that she can't escape. Despite our best attempts, Valer still got out. She was focusing on the exterior pull. She was pursuing what she thought would make her feel better.

Bring The Pull Back Home

SPEAKER_00 3:52

Here's what I want you to start to think about. What if you just stopped focusing on the exterior pull and instead brought the pull in here? Kind of like this. If my wife and I had remembered that what Valerie loves the most, besides water, is her iPad, for example, we could have easily just sat the iPad in a room. And for 20 minutes, she would love to watch Miss Rachel or Sesame Street or Little Einstein's or whatever it was. And I highly doubt she'd be escaping and walking through the neighborhood searching for her next pool of water. So let me tell you something that I'm not saying. If your spouse is leaving the marriage for whatever reason, they're pursuing their exterior pool, maybe they are uh in an affair or something like that. I want you to know that's not necessarily your fault. If your spouse is going and pursuing their own dreams and goals and maybe you disagree with them, it doesn't necessarily mean you've done anything wrong. What I'm doing in this video is not trying to help you understand how you got here. What I'm trying to do is show you what you can do that actually works to turn things around. And I'm telling you, focusing on the exterior pull is not it. Instead, we've got to find ways to maximize the pull in here.

A Client Stops Pain Shopping

SPEAKER_00 5:17

Let me give you an example of what this looks like in one of the lives of my clients. So I met this woman at a solo workshop several months back who was absolutely obsessed with the exterior pull. She was in her 50s, so was her husband. She was an American and he was German. She was living in the States, and he was supposed to be living part-time in Germany for work, but was giving indications that he might not be coming back. When I met her, like I mentioned, she was totally obsessed with this other woman, which caused her to do things which were not helpful in saving the marriage. She began what we call snooping or pain shopping. She started checking emails without his knowledge. She started monitoring his location. She started pulling phone records. She was constantly on social media to try to figure out if he was with her and what he was doing. And all that really did was give her lots of information for things that she couldn't change. And that meant that when she interacted with her spouse, she constantly was referencing all of the negative things that he was doing to the marriage. That frustration, that anger, that pain was coming out into her interactions, which was leading her spouse to feel less and less understood. It was reinforcing his decision to stay in Germany and to maybe even never come back. This is typically what we see. I know I did the same kind of things when I was in her position. But what was cool about her is that she was smart and she was strong. And the thing she learned at the solo workshop changed the way that she began to interact. Instead of dwelling on the exterior pull because she realized she couldn't control that, she instead started asking herself, what are the things that I can do to become the best version of myself? How can I make sure when I do have interactions with my husband that he begins to see this attractive woman that he married? What's so cool is that shift caused her to radically transform her interactions with her spouse. And with just a matter of months, not only was he back in the States, not only was he back in the house, he was also attending a couples workshop with her. I got to meet him online just like I met her a couple of months prior. And by the end of the workshop, they started coaching together. And the past few sessions have just been phenomenal. It has been amazing to see

Real Results And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 7:56

the transformation in their marriage. When I first met him at the workshop, I asked, why are you here? What got you to this place? And he said, it all started when my wife started making changes. I feel like my wife is the person that I married. She pulled him back towards her. And now he's doing the same things that she did all those months ago. All of this happened because one spouse decided to bring the pull back into the marriage. We'd like to help you have a similar kind of transformation. And we'd love to help you keep your focus on the things that actually can work to transform your marriage and off the things that aren't going to work. So we have this really cool assessment that's totally free. You can find it in the description below, just click the link, and it'll tell you kind of where you are in your marriage and what the next right step may be for you. Don't forget to like and subscribe and tell us in the comments below what kind of pulls do you think you could bring back into your marriage?