How To Choose Between Yourself And Your Marriage

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You don't have to pick between yourself and your marriage.

That's the lie that keeps people stuck.

Stay and shrink. Leave and grieve. Endure the mistreatment or end the marriage.

Those aren't your only options.

In this video, Nathan breaks down the difference between pain and damage, and why getting this wrong is the reason so many marriages either dissolve or destroy the people inside them.

Pain is what makes you stronger. Damage is what breaks you.

One you push through. The other you stop.

And most people can't tell them apart.

He walks through two real client stories. Both women were hurting. Both were asking the same question. "Do I keep showing up, or do I walk away?" But the right answer for one was the exact opposite of the right answer for the other.

One needed to lean in. The other needed to put up boundaries.

And the moment they figured out which was which, everything changed. Not just for them, but for their marriages too.

Because here's what nobody tells you:

What's best for you is often what's best for the marriage.

You don't have to choose.

But you do have to know the difference between the pain that's making you stronger and the damage that's slowly killing you.

That's what this video is about.

How to tell which one you're in. What to do about it. And how to stop walking on a broken leg in the name of saving your marriage.

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Transcript

The Impossible Choice Question

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Do you ever feel like you have to pick between yourself and the marriage? If you pick the marriage, then you've got to keep your mouth shut, endure mistreatment, and walk alone. But if you pick yourself, then the marriage would just dissolve because you feel like you're the only one keeping it together.

Meet Nathan On A Run

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Hi, my name's Nathan. I'm a coach and a workshop leader here at Marriage Helper. And one of the things that I love to do is run. Why don't you join me on one and let's talk about it.

Pain Vs Damage Defined

SPEAKER_00 0:36

One of the things that I'm doing when I coach people through the question that I raised earlier, what do I pick myself or my marriage? Is I introduce a concept, the difference between pain and damage. Pain is like negative emotion that if you push through, it produces positive results. It helps the situation. Damage, on the other hand, is negative emotion that if you push through will make things worse. Running is a really good metaphor for this. I love to run. And many times I set goals for myself to improve my distance, to improve my time, to help me get better at the hills or obstacles that I may be racing. And in order to improve, I have to voluntarily move through pain to get myself better. There are times, for example, when I intentionally pick places kind of like this where there are hills to help me get that endurance, so that my calves get stronger, so that when I'm racing, I'm able to perform the way that I want. There are other times when I extend the distance that I run because I know that I've got a big race that I'm training for, and my body has got to be ready in order for me to succeed. Pain is something that we can voluntarily choose to move through, despite the negative emotion we feel, that produces something good. It helps us get closer to our goals. Damage, on the other hand, if you're being damaged, you've got to stop the damage. You've got to give yourself a break. There was a time when I was extending my run, and it just so happens that I didn't have the best shoes available for the job. And when I got to mile number four, I started to notice that my feet were going numb. I knew this pain versus damage concept. I knew that if I continued to push in this moment, I wouldn't be producing positive change. It might actually lead to injury. So what did I do? I didn't push through. I actually told myself, no, we're gonna take a break. And while I was somewhat disappointed, I chose to walk to finish my run instead.

Tanya Chooses Growth Through Pain

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Let's take a second to explore how this concept, pain versus damage, might look in an actual marriage situation. Let me tell you a story of a client of mine. We'll call her Tanya. When I met Tanya, she was in her 60s. Her husband had moved out, her husband had said he wasn't sure there was hope for their marriage, and on top of it, he was pursuing a lifestyle that was absolutely in contradiction to her values. It's not a shocker to hear that Tanya was in a lot of pain. She was telling me that on our first call. And one of the things she was asking me in that session was, Nathan, should I be standing for my marriage? Do you think there is hope? Should I try to turn things around or should I just walk away and give up? And so I began to ask Tanya some questions about what her goals were, what she ultimately wanted for her life. And it became clear in that first session that she absolutely loved her husband, that she felt like he was a good person doing a bad thing, and that ultimately, if given the choice, she'd prefer to stay married, to create an even better marriage than the one that she had before. And because that was what she wanted, I then began to encourage her to move through the pain. What I began to learn as I asked her questions was yes, she was going through some hard times, but the pain that she was experiencing, that she was choosing to move through, were producing positive results, both in her and in her marriage. While it was absolutely true that having conversations with her husband presented challenges for her, like it was hard for her to go get coffee, to have a good conversation, and then to see her spouse leave and go back to wherever he was living. While that was difficult, the conversations were producing positive results for the marriage. One of the things that Tanya began to learn in our coaching was that she was not doing a very good job of listening or understanding her spouse. We sometimes use a word, you'll hear it all the time in Marriage Helper called acceptance. She wasn't really accepting her husband as he was. And she wasn't really trying to understand her husband. Instead, because she didn't feel hurt, she was using the opportunities to try to help her husband understand her, her pain, and to use her pain as some kind of trick to get him to come back. Don't you see how much you're hurting me? Can't you see how this isn't going to work in the long run? Don't you know this is not the man that I married? That's who she was before. But now that she's learning some different principles, she's learning different ways to communicate. The pain that she's experiencing by hearing her husband and how he's pursuing this lifestyle and how he's not sure that the marriage can make it, is giving her opportunities to reveal to her husband that she's different, that she's not just consumed with her own emotion, but actually she's taken an interest in his. And so I was encouraging Tanya to push through the pain voluntarily because it was moving her in a good direction.

Diana Stops The Damage With Boundaries

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Let's contrast Tanya's story with another client of mine. We'll call her Diana. When I met Diana, she too was in a lot of pain, but her situation was a little different. She was still living with her spouse, and it became very clear to me that all of the interactions she was having with her husband were doing damage to her. You see, Diana had done some things in the past that she deeply regretted. In fact, Diana had been in an affair many years ago. And it was obvious in my conversations with her that she felt remorse for that, that she had totally put that behind her, that she was not doing that kind of behavior anymore. But it seemed as though her husband could not see this new version of her. Instead, her husband could not let go of the person that he remembered. His pain was blinding him to the person that he was now married to, a different, more attractive woman. And so what Diana was doing in her conversations with her husband was trying to do the same things that I was coaching Tanya to. She was trying to understand his pain. She was creating what we call a safe place for him to talk. But when she would do that, her husband wouldn't take that opportunity to make his feelings known to try to build the relationship. Instead, what he was doing was using those conversations to once again attack his wife for the pain that he felt long ago. And so all of these interactions, rather than producing positive change in the dynamic, rather than her husband walking away feeling understood, what was happening was these conversations were making her less attractive. She was voluntarily moving into these situations, but it wasn't a pain that was producing something good. It was a damage that she was experiencing both in her personal life and in the life of the marriage. She was becoming less attractive to her husband because she allowed herself to be absolutely disrespected. When she would ask questions like, how did that make you feel? trying to be a safe place to understood, to be understood, her husband would say, if you haven't figured out by now, then you'll never figure it out. When she tried to make changes to accommodate some of the desires that he had in the home, he wouldn't acknowledge it and just said, That's not going to do anything. Yeah, I see the changes, but it means nothing. And so actually, what I began to coach Diana to do was to establish some boundaries, not to interstand, not to give up on her marriage, but to prevent herself from being damaged.

Why Self Care Helps The Marriage

SPEAKER_00 8:26

What Diana needed to do was to stand strong. Here's the important truth that I want you to take away from this video. You don't have to pick between yourself and the marriage. It might just be true that what's best for yourself is also what's best for the marriage. Let's apply it to those two women again. In Tanya's case, what was best for her was simultaneously what was best for the marriage. What's cool about her story is as she began to move through the pain, to continue to meet her husband for coffee, to continue to invite him over, to continue to go to comedy clubs and laugh together and all the rest. Well, she started to find herself being stronger. She liked who she was becoming. Her marriage had not yet gotten to the point where she wanted it, but she was enjoying this new, stronger version of herself. And at the same time, the marriage itself began to transform. Her husband started staying longer. Her husband started stopped just waiting for her to invite him over, but instead began to create some dates for them to go on themselves. They started beginning to move closer. What was best for her is also what was best for the marriage. And Diana is similar, but in the opposite kind of way. As she began to set up some boundaries, as she began to say, hey, you can't talk to me like that. And as she began to enforce those boundaries by saying, if you continue to attack me, I will be exiting the room. I'm not going to sit here and take your belittlement. In time, she started to feel stronger. She started to experience the benefits of not walking on a broken leg or a twisted ankle. She allowed herself, with the space that she created, some time to heal. And on top of that, the marriage itself began to transform as well. This is what was so cool. She thought that by establishing boundaries, her husband would walk away from her. And for a while, I'll be honest, it was tough. He tried to reassert himself and force her into conversation so that he could belittle her. But when he realized that he could not mistreat her in that way, he actually found her more attractive. And so, in time, just like in Tanya's case, he started coming up with new ways to interact with her. He started inviting her to play video games with him. When it was time to go do a family dinner, rather than him saying, no, I'm not going to be there, he actually started showing up. He even started to re-engage with her family after all this took place. And it all happened because she stopped allowing herself to be mistreated. She stopped walking on her broken foot. She allowed herself to heal. She could see the difference between pain and damage. So let me say it one more time to really drive the point home. You don't have to pick between yourself and the marriage. What's good for one will also be what's good for the other. But sometimes it's hard to know am I being damaged or am I just experiencing pain? And what we need is we need a second party. We need someone else to see our perspective, maybe someone with some knowledge and experience to help us draw a distinction between the two so that we can behave accordingly in our marriage. That's where coaching comes in. In both of those cases, Tanya and Diana were really glad that they had me there to help them think it through. If you'd like some help with a Marriage Helper coach, I want you to click the link in the description below where you can learn more about what coaching at Marriage Helper looks like. Remember, my friend, there's always hope.