She Thought She Married the Wrong Man—What Coaching Changed

She Thought She Married the Wrong Man—What Coaching Changed

Many people reach a painful conclusion in marriage: either endure a bad relationship or get divorced. In this episode of Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack, Coach Jack shares a representative client story that reflects the experience of many people he works with—those who believe they married the wrong person and feel trapped between two bad options.

Using this real-world coaching example, Coach Jack explains how changing the relationship pattern—without forcing a spouse to change—can open up options most people don’t realize they have.

What you’ll learn

• Why “Did I marry the wrong person?” is usually the wrong question
• How one spouse can change the relationship dynamic without joint therapy
• Why waiting for a spouse to change rarely works
• How boundaries and small shifts can reduce criticism and rebuild connection

Want to work with Coach Jack?

If your spouse is disengaged, critical, or unwilling to work on the marriage, one-on-one coaching may help you move forward instead of feeling stuck. Coach Jack specializes in working with individuals who want to improve their marriage—even when their spouse is not on board.
 Learn more about the Re-Connections Coaching Package 

Key takeaways

• Feeling stuck between divorce and unhappiness is a false dilemma
• One person can change the relationship pattern
• Reducing friction often comes before setting strong boundaries
• Coaching focuses on forward movement, not rehashing the past

Additional resources

• Connecting Through “Yes!” by Coach Jack
• What's Your Conflict Style (Quiz)

Work one-on-one with Coach Jack to repair your relationship using small, easy steps that rebuild connection quickly. Visit CoachJackIto.com to learn more about relationship coaching.

Transcript

She Thought She Married the Wrong Man—and What Coaching Changed

[00:00:00]Announcer: On the reconciling marriages with Coach Jack, podcast, Christian psychologist, author, and relationship coach, Dr. Jack Ito will help you to build and restore your marriage by learning just a few relationship skills you can help your spouse enjoy your relationship more while getting more love and affection from your spouse.

Listen to Coach Jack as he helps you with one more step toward a marriage. Both you and your spouse will love. 

[00:00:29]Coach Jack: I want to tell you about a client I'll call Amanda, whose story reflects the experience of many people I work with. Amanda guessed that she married the wrong person, like many other men and women, she believed that a bad relationship means you are with the wrong person.

Fortunately, Amanda discovered just in time that it wasn't true. Amanda was ready to file for divorce. When she wrote to me, she explained to me that although her relationship had been really good at first. She discovered what her husband was really like. And she reasoned with me. People don't change. [00:01:00] So staying in her relationship would just mean a lifetime of unhappiness.

For both of them, it was just an email, but I could sense the choking feeling in her voice as though she was talking to me in person. Over the years, I've received many such emails and heard a lot of such reasoning. Of course, she could have gone directly to a lawyer instead of writing me. I realized that when someone comes to me, it might be their last hope before ending their relationship.

I pray I never miss such an email in my inbox. I could have quoted statistics to Amanda. I could have told her that 40% of first marriages don't work out. Nearly 60% of second marriages don't work out, and nearly 70% of third marriages showing Amanda that people can't simply divorce and do better next time really wouldn't make her feel any more hopeful.

She didn't need to hear that she was stuck between a bad marriage and having a worse one. Amanda needed guidance, not statistics, and she needed some reason to [00:02:00] hope that her marriage wasn't over. Did I marry the wrong man? Was not a helpful question for Amanda. It could only lead her to one answer and that answer pointed toward the door.

Instead, I helped her to shift her. Question two. What is going on in my relationship and am I really handling it the right way? Looking at whether there was something she could do for her relationship, opened the door to more than two choices. She could stay, she could divorce, or she could work on her marriage in a different way, one that she had not considered.

I could join with her in seeing her husband's behavior as the problem, but we could also look at how to effectively deal with those problems. Maybe she didn't have to just wait for her husband to change. The fact is waiting for change is just about the worst way to create it. Her husband could change on his own, but wasn't likely to.

Amanda agreed to take a closer look at what her husband was doing, what she was doing, [00:03:00] and if those two things fed off of each other. Although Amanda was seriously bothered by one problem area, I had her fill out a relationship assessment so we could see if there were other points of friction. It is rare for a couple to have only one problem when they are at the point of possibly divorcing.

With the assessment, Amanda was able to identify not only other areas of dissatisfaction for her, but for her husband as well. Although Amanda was not to blame for any of her husband's behavior, there was a connection between his dissatisfaction and the way he was behaving. If we could identify ways to decrease his dissatisfaction, that would likely decrease her husband's bad behavior, we would still need to use boundaries, but making the problem smaller would make the boundaries less severe and more effective.

What I was helping Amanda to do was to change the pattern, the relationship dance that she and her husband knew by heart. In fact, they didn't know any other way to relate to each other. [00:04:00] We started with small changes that wouldn't cause resistance by her husband and eliminated the negative talking they were both used to.

Although Amanda's husband was not part of our sessions, he didn't need to be. The changes that Amanda was making did not allow her husband to dance the same old dance. He would either learn to dance differently or Amanda could still divorce knowing that she had done all that she could for her marriage.

At our next session, Amanda was feeling less upset. The small steps she was taking and the refusal to get into negative relationship talk were resulting in a few pleasant interactions with her husband. They were a long way from reconciling, but they had started down that path. Amanda also felt better having a plan and specific steps to work on.

Our sessions were for helping Amanda to move forward, not for dwelling on all the problems she had with her husband throughout her marriage. This was a shift for Amanda who previously got only support from her therapist. [00:05:00] While she talked about all the things that bothered her, I needed to help Amanda look forward, not back.

Goals can only be accomplished for the future, not the past. What I really wanted to know was how Amanda wanted her relationship to be with her husband. Regardless of how it had been getting clarity and separating realistic from unrealistic goals were our next step. After that, we could refer back to the assessment to see what obstacles were currently getting in the way of her goals for her marriage.

No one wants to live with a partner who is negative and critical. I would no more want that for Amanda than I would want it for myself. If we couldn't find a way to change that, then at least Amanda could be more sure when she signed the divorce papers. I asked Amanda whether she would want to give her marriage with her husband a chance, if we could change his critical behavior.

She said that was the only way she would stay. But yes, she wanted that if it was possible. I have helped many women with self-focused and critical husbands, but this [00:06:00] was Amanda's first time to learn how to deal with such a man. While there are many such men, I have never met a man who wanted to be critical to the point of losing his wife.

His criticisms were serving some other purpose, and we needed to figure out what that was. It was my hope that the small changes that Amanda was doing to reduce the friction between her and her husband would take away some of the need for his criticism. Then we could begin to introduce boundaries. I offered Amanda some choices for where to start with boundaries.

The one that she chose was to end conversations whenever her husband started to become critical. Although Amanda had walked away from conversations many times, it was only after things had become very critical and conflicted ending conversations. For the first moment, the criticism appeared was something very new.

It was a change in the relationship dance. Amanda and I talked about how to introduce this change. Her husband would have to understand why [00:07:00] she was ending the conversation, and she would need to be able to do it in a way that wasn't overreactive or critical of her husband. People never feel bad about what they do if we treat them badly for doing it.

The first time Amanda tried this with her husband, she wrote down how things went so we could discuss it in her next session. She didn't need to do anything perfectly. She just needed to start taking the steps along the path of relationship improvement and respect building. As with many such situations, the combination of Amanda being more positive with her husband while also using boundaries.

Rapidly improved their marriage. Amanda's boundaries helped her husband start to catch himself being critical and to self-censor. This change in behavior was very encouraging for Amanda. It was also empowering. The self-censoring showed her that her husband cared more about getting along with her than he did about criticizing her.

It also helped him to see his behavior for what it was previously. He had thought of [00:08:00] his behavior as helpful. Or insightful Amanda's actions helped him to see that they were not helpful and actually harmed his relationship with her. He also saw quite clearly that Amanda was not going to tolerate it, although she had tried to tell him as much many times before.

It was only her actions that helped him to finally understand and change. As Amanda and I continued our work together, she gave up the idea that her husband was the wrong man for her as a loving wife. She helped her husband to be helpful and insightful and to feel good about himself. These were things that he was really wanting much more than he was wanting to be critical.

Previously, Amanda had just shut off his words when he tried to talk to her. That wasn't the answer. Helping him to help her in non-critical ways was the solution. It helped her husband to feel important and capable while taking even more of the negativity out of their relationship. In [00:09:00] coaching, Amanda learned how to help her husband to get in a good way, what he was previously trying to get in a bad way, and she got more of the love from him that she had been missing.

I'm proud of Amanda as I am of all my clients who are willing to do the work. Not only for their sake, but for their spouse's sake as well. Have you been feeling some of the things that Amanda did, that your choices are either to suffer with a bad marriage or to divorce? Just like Amanda, you have more than two choices.

In fact, one person can make a difference that sometimes two can't. If you feel caught between a rock and a hard place, one-on-one coaching can help. Work with me and let's see if we can't make your marriage better for the both of you, it may be one of the most loving things you have ever done. See my Re-Connections Coaching Package for details.

[00:09:51]Announcer: Thank you for listening to Reconciling Marriages with Coach Jack. Visit coachjackito.com to learn more skills for reconnecting with your [00:10:00] spouse and restoring your marriage.