4 Steps of Marital Demolition

Houses do not do well went their foundation is not strong, level, and firm. Neither do marriages. Learn 4 steps you can take today to enable you to strip away parts of your structure so you can examine and repair you foundation. Then, you can begin inspecting the rest of your relationship, and rebuild a beautiful home that is secure, an impenetrable fortress.

Transcript

Hey guys, Dee Bonney here, I'm not very handy and any more. I just own that. So I've never built a house. I've owned several and I've had a couple built. So I've gotten to kind of participate in the process. But I do know a couple of things. I know that when it comes to building a house or any structure, that the foundation is extremely important. Like if it's not level and strong and secure, if it's cracked. These are all things that will result in the rest of the structure just being unsafe.
Now I know that when it comes to houses, sometimes they look fine. Especially from the outside. They might have the appearance that everything inside is fine. And sometimes when we're inside, things seem fine. But if the foundation is off, if there are problems on that solid base. Then the walls might look straight, but we don't know that the support structures are under strain. Or maybe inside the house, we start noticing that things aren't right. The drywall is cracked and a leaky roof is betrayed by some moisture in the ceiling that shouldn't be there. Yet outside, everything might look great. And in fact, the neighbors might comment on the house and how beautiful it is. And there's just this appearance on the Facebook highlight reel of the exterior of your house. That everything's great. What a metaphor for our lives.
Have you been there? Have you been in a situation where the external part of your life, it looks really good. But inside, inside things are starting to come apart. So what that looks like is maybe inside the home, there's regret and there's distrust. Maybe there's resentment that's been going on for a long time. These things inside of our family, inside of our marriages, they're starting to cause more problems. Because that foundation's not there. The structure is starting to get creaky. And then one day, even the exterior just comes crashing down. And people all around, they're like, "Man, like I see it now. But I never would have seen it because they seem so happy."
It's pretty easy for us to live in denial. That there are problems in our marriage or in our family dynamics. I've talked about it before, we can put on this nice facade. This fake brick exterior that looks incredible to people. And yet inside, inside where we're dealing with chaos, we're dealing with loss of love, we're dealing with lack of forgiveness. On the outside people don't see it. All the Facebook pictures, click. Like we're all happy, we're a wonderful family, we got it all together.
Maybe you've been there. Maybe you're there right now. Where things are not inside the way they appear outside. And I believe that we need a tactical approach to confront these issues from the foundation all the way up. And I'm going to offer you four suggestions today. But first, let's take a look at three things that can happen. That can cause that foundation to start erode. And it's as it used to be. It's not as we intend it to be.
The first idea that I have that causes loss of structural integrity of the foundation is lack of trust. So if you're in a relationship with another person and you blow trust, man, that's huge. And that might be something benign like failure to disclose a purchase that you made, that you don't want your spouse to know about. It might be lying about where you went, who you were with. Maybe you get caught, maybe you don't. But that structural integrity it's starting to become weak.
Infidelity. Man, that's the atomic bomb of relationship mistrust. I mean, when we're in a marriage, we expect that other person to be faithful. Like full of faith. And when infidelity hits, trust is gone. If you know my story, you know that in my marriage three years ago, we had to overcome infidelity. And we've done so really well, which is why I'm here talking to you. But man, the loss of trust, that's devastating to a home.
The second issue that I see happening inside of homes, inside of families and marriages is old injuries flaring up. Like old injuries, either between the two of you as a couple that have been going on for a decade or two. Or even injuries that you had that never healed from prior to your relationship. If not dealt with, over time that's going to erode that foundation. And then one day you're looking and you're like, "I don't know why our walls aren't plum. I don't know why their stress fractures in the structure." And then you look back and there's unresolved hurts. There's wounds that never got dealt with.
And then a third concept is what I've presented as this idea of disempowering negative loops. Disempowering, so wiping the two of you clean of any power, negative loops. So these become things that are just automatic. And a lot of times it's how we communicate. It's this chronic difficulty in communication where your wife says one thing to you and your rebuttal is something else that's harmful and then she comes back harmful. And you don't even realize that you're doing it. After a period of time, it's just the way you are. And you might even just give up on thinking that it can never change. But I'm telling you that it can. So these disempowering negative loops, they become automations. Stimulus, response. Stimulus, response. Stimulus, response. And if you don't look for it, you're not even going identify that that's the thing that's tearing your foundation apart.
So here we go, I'm going to talk about four tactics that you can use to go back and basically start tearing your structure down and rebuilding it on a solid foundation, on a firm foundation. So the first idea I want to present is to examine your foundation. I mean, we had to strip all the drywall off, look at the studs, get all the way down below the flooring and look at the foundation that our relationship was built on. This is the point where you really examine the substance of your values. Yes, you have a right to believe however you want to believe. You have a right to set whatever values you want to set. But when trouble comes along, you need to take a serious look at that and think is this working?
For us, we had to find God in the mess. We had to realize that our foundation for our marriage was ineffective. We had to get the jackhammer out. We had to start tearing that up and rebuilding it. Re-laying a foundation that started with our surrender to God. Now for some of you, that sounds like a really foreign concept. Megan and I really had to surrender to God, we had to let him reset our moral compass. What we came to find out was that he gave us a user manual. He knows how he put us together and then he gave us a user manual. You know it as the Bible.
Now I grew up thinking in such a way that this was a bunch of do this, don't do that. Because I'm a raffle God and you don't want to go to hell when you die. What I've come to learn is that all the do's and don'ts that he put in that user manual, they're there for my protection. So when we just surrendered. We surrendered ourselves and said, "God our foundation is not working. We need you to show us how to lay a solid base that we can build our marriage on." What that looked like for us, was we had to stop doing things our own way. Because we had to actually acknowledge that we were doing was not working. Over and over again, it wasn't working.
The second idea that I want to present to you is that you need to learn home inspection. So for us, that meant getting to the point that we actually started developing wisdom that we got from reading God's word. We had to fill ourselves with good things. We had to fill ourselves with multiple pastors podcasts. We had to change how our thinking was so that we could get that firm foundation that we needed to build a beautiful house, to build a beautiful marriage. We had to journal daily. We had to pray together out loud daily. We had to read the Bible. All these things we did so that we could learn how to be a husband, how to be a wife.
In Proverbs 4:7, it says the beginning of wisdom is this. Get wisdom, though it cost all that you have. Get understanding. So the way that we tried to learn home inspection, to see if the structure that we were building was going to be solid for decades to come, is we got in the Bible. We tried to learn what it meant to be a wonderful husband, to be a wonderful wife, to be a great leader for our families.
There's a story that's told of a Cherokee grandfather and he's talking to his grandson. And he explains to him that inside of him, the grandfather, there are two wolves. One wolf is bad, evil, full of hatred, full of unforgiveness. This wolf is kind of bent on self-destruction. This wolf is out for his own good and ready to tear everything apart. The other wolf, he's explaining to his grandson. The other wolf is kind and good, patient, persevering, forgiving. The other wolf is full of love. And so the grandson asks, "Which wolf is going to win the battle?" And the grandfather says, "The one that I feed." And that has been so true in our lives and our marriage. Like what we feed inside of us grows.
So if you're at a point that you're struggling in your marriage, in other relationships, in life in general. And I'm going to encourage you, take a look at what you're feeding yourself. What are you consuming? Do you have like the top three news networks on all day? And you're losing your mind because everybody said everything different and everyone has a conspiracy theory. Are you consuming content on social media that makes you feel worse? We've got to take a look at how are we obtaining wisdom? Everyone out there will give you advice on your marriage. There's just plenty of people that you should not be listening to. I had to take note of that in my own relationship. When Megan and I were trying to rebuild, I wanted counsel from people who knew what they were talking about.
The third concept after you've established your foundation and you've learned how to inspect. Is to evaluate your support structures. So in our marriage, once we were surrendering ourselves and trying to learn what it took to be better at doing marriage. When we were trying to figure out that there has to be a different way. Because what we're doing is setting us up for repeated failures. And then as we started trying to get wisdom to learn how to do that because we're filling our minds with good things. The next step was to start evaluating. Like looking at walls. Is this wall plum? Is the weight evenly distributed? So we looked at different aspects of our lives.
So this is the point where we start examining, like how do we characterize a good marriage? For us up until this point? I think we both were still chasing after the Hollywood idea of a great marriage. Romance on top of romance on top of romance. And we thought, "That's what's going to sustain us." Man, we were wrong. See that's not how God designed marriage. Romance is wonderful and we have a lot of romance. It's great. But that's not what's supporting our entire marital home. Really it's things like learning what it means to love each other.
There's a great chapter in First Corinthians, it's First Corinthians 13 about verses 4-7. The writer Paul, he's describing what love is. This is not even about marriage. This is the love that will hold you together with anyone, with all of mankind. It's this selfless, unconditional love. Paul talks about how it's a love that's patient and kind. It's not easily angered. It doesn't boast. It does not dishonor the other. It keeps no record of wrongs. It always hopes, always perseveres, always protects and it never fails.
You see we were able to, at this point, really start examining different parts of our lives. And making sure that we were using God's wisdom in each of those areas. Like for example, our finances. Like we can take a look at that and go, "Okay, how we're dealing with our money, is that congruent with the wisdom that we're reading about in the Bible? How we're raising our kids, how we're enacting discipline on them? Is that good? How we're handling our sexuality? Is that okay? Are we doing things the way God intended us to do it?"
And then the fourth concept is to secure your perimeter wall. See beyond thinking of marriage as just a home, I now like to think of it as a fortress. And this fortress is here to protect my loved ones that are inside of it. And we had gaping holes previously in our fortress. We let people in that should not have been behind those walls. But now, now I will build a fence, I will even put a moat. Whatever it takes to protect my fortress. And in real life in practical terms, what that means is that Megan and I have steel reinforced boundaries. Especially when it comes to how we relate to people, the opposite sex. We're not cultivating opposite sex friendships. I'm not going out and meeting people for coffee and texting and talking for hours on the phone with someone of the opposite sex. I mean, we have some couples that we're friends with and so those friendships are there. But we're not nurturing opposite gender friendships. I think that's really dangerous.
We have very good boundaries when it comes to social media. We do not have secret passcodes. Our phones are an open book. Our social media passwords are an open book. All of these things that you can do that will secure that perimeter. Because you want to protect your relationship with one another. You want to protect your own heart. You want to protect your children. And these are all ways that you can begin making sure that what's inside of there is absolutely safe.
Another thing that we don't allow ourselves to do, is we don't allow ourselves to triangulate relationships. And one of the ways that that happens is husband or wife goes and talks to their mom about their spouse and this is bad. Or they're talking to friends and they're basically dishonoring the spouse. And really trying to get people to come on board on their side and look what he's doing and how he's making me feel. Now there is a time when you can have a really good friendship with someone and you can go to that person, looking for wisdom. Gossip is not looking for wisdom. And so if I approach a friend of mine and say, "Hey, I'm having this issue with Megan. And I respect your marriage and I love what you guys do. And I think that you have a lot of thoughtfulness that you can give to this situation. Can you direct me?" That's okay. But just going to my buddy and complaining over drinks about what my wife is doing. And how she discussed me and I don't like this or that, that's no good. That is not protecting your perimeter.
Securing our perimeter also means that we go out of our way to study one another. I want to know what Megan likes, I want to know how I can serve her well. How I can show up day after day after day and be the man that God calls me to be. Be the man that she needs me to be. So we learn one another's love languages. We learn what one another is afraid of. We learn how to connect in that most intimate way so that there's never a reason for either of us to seek romance outside of our marriage.
So just to wrap it up here, I hope this is helpful for you guys. I hope you took notes. If you didn't, go back and listen again, takes the notes, implement this. So the first concept for how you basically kind of tear down the structure and start rebuilding is to examine your foundation. See what your marriage is based on. Really take a close look at your values. How's your moral compass aimed? Is that a foundation that's going to allow you to erect walls that are straight and strong and can handle the storms that come along?
The second idea was learn to be a house inspector. Get wisdom, for us that meant look into the Bible, listening to some really smart guys speak at their church each Sunday. Just learning, soaking up, feeding our minds good things. So that we could discern what was wise and what was not wise in our marriage.
Then the third idea was really take a detailed look at the structure. Start looking at piece by piece, different areas of your relationship. Compare it to what you've learned about foundations, what you've learned about wisdom, what you've learned about how to have a great marriage. Are they lining up? Is there congruency? Or is this part still off on its own? And if it is, it's not going to bless you. It will end up affecting your life.
Then the fourth idea, secure that perimeter. Do not let anything in. Establish really good boundaries for how you and your spouse interact with the world around you. Because there's storms all around, there's wolves waiting to tear your marriage apart. I don't want to see that happen.
So guys, if this is helpful, do me a favor. Leave a comment with whatever platform you're looking at this at. That helps us get some feedback from you. Things that you like, or you don't like, or you disagree with. Come over to YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Subscribe to the Dee Bonney - Ignite Your Marriage podcast. That way, anytime something new is coming out, you get an update that there's more free content coming your way.
I hope this helps you find just an amazing marriage. Because I believe in you. I believe that you can get the tools that you need to take wherever your marriage is and start turning around. That you can elevate it, that you can ignite it. Catch it on fire. There's little embers there from long ago, little embers of love that's still there. And so many times it gets lost in the mess and the chaos, these ashes that are laying on top of it. And I want to start fanning those embers. And I want to see you get a marriage that's just this amazing bonfire. It's going to bless you. It's going to bless your kids. It's going to bless your community. I love you guys. Thanks for tuning in.