Picture this: You're standing at the crossroads of your marriage, feeling all alone because your spouse seems uninterested in making things work. How do you navigate these turbulent times to rescue your marriage? It's a question many of us have had to grapple with. This week, on It Starts With Attraction, we delve into the misconceptions surrounding marriage counseling, emphasizing the importance of early intervention and looking beyond the symptoms of marital discord to address the root cause.
Kimberly graciously shares her personal journey through a rough patch in her own marriage, offering invaluable advice based on her experience and professional expertise. Through the course of the episode, we unveil the first three steps to save a marriage - calming down, getting clarity, and stop pushes and start pulls. We also explore real-life scenarios where understanding the true source of conflicts not only improved the marriage but also drew the reluctant spouse closer. Kimberly's approach is practical and heartfelt, making this conversation a must-listen for anyone seeking guidance in keeping their marriage afloat.
However, the journey of saving a marriage is not a solitary one. As a community, we share our struggles, our hopes, and our experiences, creating a space of shared understanding and support. We discover how to become the person that people want to be around, and the importance of commitment in making a marriage last. So join us, as we navigate the maze of marital discord, and come out stronger on the other side. Remember - you are not alone in this journey, and there's always hope.
If you're looking for a chance to get Kimberly to speak on your stage or at your event, click here!
Your Host: Kimberly Beam Holmes, Expert in Self-Improvement and Relationships
Kimberly Beam Holmes has applied her master's degree in psychology for over ten years, acting as the CEO of Marriage Helper & CEO and Creator of PIES University, being a wife and mother herself, and researching how attraction affects relationships. Her videos, podcasts, and following reach over 200,000 people a month who are making changes and becoming the best they can be.
Website: www.kimberlybeamholmes.com
Thanks for listening!
Connect on Instagram: @kimberlybeamholmes
Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to the podcast and leave a review!
WE HAVE A NEW WEBSITE!!
Visit www.itstartswithattraction.com to check it out!
Picture this: You're standing at the crossroads of your marriage, feeling all alone because your spouse seems uninterested in making things work. How do you navigate these turbulent times to rescue your marriage? It's a question many of us have had to grapple with. This week, on It Starts With Attraction, we delve into the misconceptions surrounding marriage counseling, emphasizing the importance of early intervention and looking beyond the symptoms of marital discord to address the root cause.
Kimberly graciously shares her personal journey through a rough patch in her own marriage, offering invaluable advice based on her experience and professional expertise. Through the course of the episode, we unveil the first three steps to save a marriage - calming down, getting clarity, and stop pushes and start pulls. We also explore real-life scenarios where understanding the true source of conflicts not only improved the marriage but also drew the reluctant spouse closer. Kimberly's approach is practical and heartfelt, making this conversation a must-listen for anyone seeking guidance in keeping their marriage afloat.
However, the journey of saving a marriage is not a solitary one. As a community, we share our struggles, our hopes, and our experiences, creating a space of shared understanding and support. We discover how to become the person that people want to be around, and the importance of commitment in making a marriage last. So join us, as we navigate the maze of marital discord, and come out stronger on the other side. Remember - you are not alone in this journey, and there's always hope.
If you're looking for a chance to get Kimberly to speak on your stage or at your event, click here!
Your Host: Kimberly Beam Holmes, Expert in Self-Improvement and Relationships
Kimberly Beam Holmes has applied her master's degree in psychology for over ten years, acting as the CEO of Marriage Helper & CEO and Creator of PIES University, being a wife and mother herself, and researching how attraction affects relationships. Her videos, podcasts, and following reach over 200,000 people a month who are making changes and becoming the best they can be.
Website: www.kimberlybeamholmes.com
Thanks for listening!
Connect on Instagram: @kimberlybeamholmes
Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to the podcast and leave a review!
WE HAVE A NEW WEBSITE!!
Visit www.itstartswithattraction.com to check it out!
Hey, thanks for joining us on today's episode of it Starts With Attraction. My name is Jason, I'm one of the producers of the podcast and today we're going to hear from a webinar that Kimberly did a few months ago. In this webinar, kimberly covered marriage helpers new seven steps to rescue your marriage, and she goes super in depth on the first three steps. She also touches on her own experience of going through a rough patch in her marriage and the things she did that she wouldn't recommend, as well as the things she did to have the marriage she has with her husband today. I hope you enjoyed this episode and be sure to stick around to the end. There's an interesting opportunity for those of you that might be hosting a conference, a women's group, a marriage event or personal development seminar. But, without further ado, here's this week's episode of it Starts With Attraction. Let's dive in.
Speaker 2:Today we're going to be talking about how to save your marriage when your spouse isn't on board. Here's my question to you In this situation that you're in, the situation that your marriage is in, do you feel tired? Do you tired of working on saving it? Are you emotionally, mentally or physically drained? Do you feel hopeless? Do you feel defeated? Do you feel like you have tried everything, you know how to try and you are at your wit's end. You don't even know what else to do? Do you feel like your spouse hates you? Do you feel like maybe your spouse loves you but isn't in love with you? Maybe these are things that you have heard, or maybe is your spouse in love with someone else, and I still see people saying yes, yes, yes. This is what I feel like. This is what my spouse has said to me. This is not uncommon. This is very often what we hear when people first come to us at Marriage Helper, and I'm sure at times you feel crazy, you feel overwhelmed, or maybe you even feel unsure about how to even save this mess of a marriage that you're in. As I asked at the beginning, maybe you've tried several things and they haven't worked, or maybe you just found out that something was a problem a couple of days ago, and you're so overwhelmed at where to even start that you don't even know how to start or what to start or where to start, and everything that you've looked at or searched for hasn't maybe made sense yet, and so you're trying to make sense of this incredibly senseless and frustrating situation. Have you tried any other things to help you save your marriage that had no success? And again, I would love to see you drop this in the chat. What are the things that you've tried? Did they help? To what extent? For how long?
Speaker 2:I was reading research just this morning about different interventions, different counseling interventions and the efficacy according to the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy, and I was once again incredibly disheartened when I was reading about one intervention in particular, a very popular one, and it said that there was short term benefit, but long term not benefits, long term discussion or destruction. Basically, it said, for a couple of weeks following this intensive type of therapy, there seemed to be positive results, but all of those results waned and faltered after about eight weeks of the therapy and I thought, gosh, how defeating to taste a glimpse of hope and then, eight weeks later for it to just fizzle and fade. And so many of you are saying, yes, we've tried counseling, we did counseling. They wouldn't do counseling couples. Counseling made things worse. The counselor created more problems long term. Yeah, it can be incredibly frustrating and maybe you've spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars on books, courses and counseling, only to be worse off than you were when you started. There was a couple that we worked with a couple of months ago that had spent $27,000 in counseling for none of it to work Unbelievable. So if you're frustrated, if you're confused, if you're hopeless, if you're defeated, if you're overwhelmed, I feel your pain. You're in good company today and you're in good company with what we do at Marriage Helper.
Speaker 2:For those of you who don't know me, baby, this is your first webinar. My name is Kimberly Beame Holmes and I'm going to be your host today. Of course, I'm a wife, I'm a mom, I am the CEO of Marriage Helper, I am a podcast host and I am a speaker. Oh, and I'm also a PhD candidate. So for the past two and a half almost three years now I've had my head down in a lot of research and a lot of dissertation work, doing my own research, as well as understanding how to most effectively interpret and understand the research that is out there. Everything that we do at Marriage Helper is research-based, and at Marriage Helper, we have been around as a company, as an organization, for over 24 years. And the ways that we work with couples we've been doing it for over 24 years. Our team not just me, I've been at Marriage Helper for 11 years, but our team has been doing this for an incredibly long time and we've worked with over 25,000 clients in just the past 10 years. And so you're not alone. You're not alone, and what I want to share with you today is several things, but before I share those with you, I want to tell you that 10 years ago, I was going through my master's program in marriage and family therapy.
Speaker 2:That's actually kind of how I started off, even working at Marriage Helper. To begin with. I started working at Marriage Helper 11 years ago, part-time, in the Shoot. I was basically an executive assistant all that time ago, but I was doing it because I was going through my master's program in marriage and family therapy, doing counseling with couples, doing practicum work, doing internships. I was doing all of those things and at the exact same time, my own marriage was in shambles At that same time.
Speaker 2:I, actually my husband and I my husband was in the military at the time and we were geographically separated for a year but we made the choice to be separated and when we reflected on that I mean in the past several years, as we reflected on that decision where he was stationed in Korea and I ended up going home early to start my master's in marriage and family therapy we both reflected after the fact that really we made that decision because both of us already were wanting a break from each other only about a year and a half, two years, into our marriage. And guess what? The break, the separation, it didn't make anything better and in fact, my husband ended up coming back from Korea. We ended up living together again and it was even harder to reintegrate into our marriage and to make things work and there was even more issues that had come up during all of that time, and so it was really hard to be going through a program learning how to teach other people to do the right things and work on their marriage, when I needed intense help for my own and my husband had no interest in working on the marriage with me.
Speaker 2:Maybe this sounds like where many of you are today. And what was even worse is we weren't headed for divorce. Now some of you may read that and think what do you mean? That was even worse. It's terrible to be headed for divorce, and you're right, it is absolutely terrible. But you know what else is terrible being terrified that you're going to be stuck in a completely crappy marriage for the rest of your life that you absolutely hate.
Speaker 2:Because in my family, the way I grew up, divorce was not an option. And if any of you knew the background of my parents and how they are, the shining story of reconciliation and what can happen when a marriage comes back from being divorced three years I mean, that's my legacy. Those are my parents. How could I ever face the shame of divorce after having parents and working at a company that stood for everything? Against that? I didn't want to divorce my husband. I loved him. I wanted to make it work.
Speaker 2:So for us at that moment and based on what was happening, divorce wasn't an option for me. Divorce wasn't really an option for him. There were a couple of times that he threatened it, but he never followed through with it. But it didn't change the fact that our marriage was not good, not good at all, and my husband had absolutely no interest in helping or doing anything about it. I felt alone, I felt embarrassed, I felt ashamed and ultimately I felt scared. I really didn't know what to do. I did to an extent, but when you're the one going through it, you don't know what to do. It's hard to counsel yourself. It's hard to do that kind of things. That's one of the first things they teach you as you're becoming a counselor or therapist. But does that sound like how you feel right now? Alone, ashamed, embarrassed, scared? I understand those feelings.
Speaker 2:I tried counseling. I went to counseling. It only made things worse. We went my husband and I actually did. The military offered a couple of marriage enrichment, events that were free, kind of weekend things that we went to at that time. We went. It didn't help. I even tried counseling myself, which I just said a minute ago. It doesn't work. It is impossible. There is way too much emotional, emotional fog and bias to effectively look at your own situation in a productive way. But trying to DIY, to fix it on my own, it did not work. Counseling literally made everything worse.
Speaker 2:I was laying in bed this morning thinking about how I was going to be presenting this today and I thought, man, when I was going through it, when our marriage was going through the worst of it 10 years ago, I wish I could remember exactly what my counselor at that point said. I honestly don't remember anything that counselor said to me, but I remember every single time I left his office I felt worse than when I came. I felt more hopeless about my situation. I felt more alone. I felt more judged because I wanted to save it, and the feeling and sentiment that I got from my counselor was that he did not necessarily agree. He was focused way more on my feelings and me talking about my feelings, which just made me angrier and resent the situation more. It was not at all productive and it changed my heart towards my husband for the worse.
Speaker 2:According to research I was just reading this this morning nearly 40% of couples who go to counseling report their marriage being made worse after counseling than before they went. Hmm, that's a sobering statistic. I was also reading this morning an article that a counselor had written, talking about how timing is everything when it comes to going to counseling and how you really need to do it before things get bad and before things get rocky. I thought, yeah, wouldn't that be the ideal if two people, when they want to be proactive in making their marriage work and be great, would agree to do something like that. But the truth of the matter is this we at Marriage Helper have seen that, even if your spouse doesn't want to go to counseling with you, even if you feel like it's too far gone, even if all of those things are true where it feels overwhelming, your spouse has made up their mind. They just want out. What we have seen in the work that we do is marriages saved Even when everything else looks hopeless. We have a mantra at Marriage Helper where we say nothing is unrecoverable. I'm going to show you a little bit more about that.
Speaker 2:In our time together, I wasn't alone in what I was going through 10 years ago, because even just today, as I was looking, there's more information on how to end a marriage than to save it. I did a quick Google search and there was 25 percent more search results for how to get a divorce than how to save my marriage. There was a guy that sent me an email a couple of weeks ago at Marriage Helper and he said that after he had gone through the muck in the mire of the Google search, he was literally looking for how to save his marriage. On Google, he kept being hit by ads from divorce lawyers encouraging him to get divorced quick, encouraging him to do it for cheap, encouraging him to just get it done. He didn't want to get a divorce, he wanted to save his marriage, but in the midst of all the advertising, all he could see was the reasons that he should give up. And in the email that he was sending to me and my team, he said I just want to thank you for being a voice of hope in the midst of the darkness, because this is what I was looking for how I can save my marriage, not how do I get a divorce.
Speaker 2:The second thing is there's more support for ending your marriage than for saving it. What does that mean? People are 75 percent more likely to end their marriage if a friend is divorced, according to a research from Brown University and other places. I've seen this multiple times. Having divorced friends can significantly increase your chance of becoming divorced yourself. Here's what that means You're more likely to have people in your life who have experienced divorce or bad marriage marriages to speak into your life and encourage you to get divorced as well. So there tends to be more support around getting a divorce, around doing what makes you happy, around following your heart. Then there is around people knowing how to actually stand with you in the middle of a hard time of your marriage and support you in saving it. You'll find way more people taking the easy answer to just get divorced than to do the hard work of helping you actually save it.
Speaker 2:And it's easier to end a marriage than it is to save it. At the end of the day. You can find, if you look, all of those advertisements that that one guy was talking about. You can find the ads. I found it today when I Googled how to get a divorce, just looking at the statistics and how many search engine results came up from it. It was so many ads on the Google sponsored ads thing where it said get a divorce quick and cheap $149,. All of this stuff. It just makes it so easy to throw away. It's so much easier in our society to end a marriage than it is to save it, and that's terrible, that's heartbreaking.
Speaker 2:It wasn't always that way. This actually came from the no fault divorce that started in the 1980s. Before the 1980s, people were in what psychology sees as a commitment based marriage. It's when marriage is lasted, when people made decisions to do what was best for the marriage because it was best for the family. That's how people thought about marriage before the 1980s. But after the 1970s, the 1980s, we moved into what psychology is now calling an era of individualistic expressiveness marriages. It's where basically every person in the marriage is just doing what makes them happy in the moment. And so not only are we seeing a rise of divorce, we're seeing a decrease in marriage, because if I'm only going to do what makes me happy in the moment, then how do I know you're going to make me happy next year? I'd rather just not commit to you.
Speaker 2:And so we see that marriage, the foundation of strong families for millennia, is now becoming something that's easy to throw away. That's not the way it's supposed to be. It should not be easier to end a marriage than to keep it going. So there's a lot against you and there was a lot against me. 10 years ago I realized I wasn't alone in how frustrated I felt, and you're not alone either. And for me nothing worked. The counseling, the things nothing worked until something really worked. Have you felt alone? I've asked you this multiple times and you keep saying, yes, you've probably felt alone. You're not alone. You can save your marriage even if your spouse isn't on board. I know from my personal experience and from the experience in thousands of people we worked with, and that's what I'm going to reveal to you today.
Speaker 2:Today, what we're actually going to cover isn't just how to save your marriage when your spouse isn't on board. We're going to cover the first three steps to take to save your marriage, and this is hot off the press. You're about to hear the new way that we are working with clients at Marriage Helper. It's a new seven-step process. So by the end of our time together, you will leave with three things that you can do to save your marriage. And here's where we're going to start the seven steps to rescue your marriage. These are seven steps. Today we're going to go over the first three, but here's what I want you to see. These are the seven steps that have to happen in order for you to rescue and reconcile your marriage. We've spent a lot of time at the Marriage Helper team coming up with these three, with these seven steps, and really identifying in all the ways that we work with our clients. How can we narrow it down and boil it down to the seven steps that they need to take so that they can see it, so that they can understand what they need to do and what's coming next to fully save their marriage and not just save it but have it be better than it was ever before?
Speaker 2:The first step is to calm down. We're going to talk about these first three in depth in just a minute. Once you calm down, then we need to get clarity on what the real issue is. Once you have clarity on what the real issue is, then we need to work with you to begin to pull your spouse closer. Once your spouse has begun to pull closer, then step four is to forgive and reconcile.
Speaker 2:People ask me all the time when I'm on interviews, media, all of those things they say can one spouse really save a marriage? One spouse by themselves? Surely not. It takes two and I always say it absolutely takes only one person to begin doing the things to save a marriage. It takes two to reconcile. They're two different things. They are two different things and until you understand the real deep steps that have to happen before you can reconcile, you won't really fully be able to reconcile, and that's what we're going to go into today. Before your spouse comes back through that door and I know that's what you want, whether you're physically separated or not before your spouse comes back and wanting to be with you. I know that you wish that that would happen and then everything would be better, but that's not true. You think that, but if you don't actually deal with fixing the things that were broken, you're just going to be back to where you were if you don't do the work, and that's what we want to help you do. So step four is forgive and reconcile. It's only at step four that your spouse even needs to be involved, that we don't worry about your spouse wanting to save the marriage or not until step four, because during steps one through three, you're doing the work to pull them back, so you have the maximal effect of getting your spouse to come back and actually work towards reconciliation. That's in step four.
Speaker 2:After step four, we go through steps five through seven. In five, we start rebuilding trust. Now that you're reconciled, how do you rebuild trust with each other? Step six is igniting intimacy and passion, and step seven is creating a dream life together. Can you see how this works? Can you see how, even if you can't see yourself in this right now, can you understand how? This is the seven step process that you would need to follow in order to save your marriage? So the first step that we are going to cover in our time together, we're going to focus on the first three, and the first one is to calm down.
Speaker 2:How many of you, when you found out about your marriage crisis, or when your spouse left, or when you found out about an affair, whatever it was that led you here, how many of you ended up reacting in a way that, when you looked back, you regretted your first response? You regretted your first actions, because in the midst of you doing that, you absolutely ended up making things worse. Maybe it was that you called and texted them multiple times. Maybe it was that you followed them when they were trying to leave. Maybe you tried to physically restrain them from leaving. Maybe you ended up crying and having an emotional meltdown in front of them. Maybe you ended up saying things that you really wish that you wouldn't have said, because you were just trying to get them to stay.
Speaker 2:Calm down. The first thing that you need to do if you're wanting to save your marriage is to have an emotional, to get in more control of your emotions than you already are. You're never going to be perfect at this, but the goal is to get calm enough to where you're not making illogical mistakes or you're not acting in an erratic or illogical way. So what does it mean to calm down? That you don't just calm down for one time, but you remain calm. You get to a place where you're not looking at your situation day in and day out as the end of everything. You're not responding to it as it's the biggest emergency of your life. It is something that needs to be worked on. You do need to take it very seriously what's going on in your marriage and how you want to move forward and save it. But if you allow your heightened anxiety and your heightened fear and your heightened emotions to dictate your actions, it's going to continue to keep you stuck. You won't be able to move on to the next step. You can't get clarity on what's really going on when you are acting irrationally and when you're letting your emotions lead you and guide you. So part of doing this is working on yourself finding ways to emotionally regulate and get calm. You see, in getting calm let me get some of my notes for this I was just making notes right before this In getting calm, it's hard to do this on our own, and maybe you've realized this.
Speaker 2:Maybe you've been trying to figure out how to get calm or stay calm in the middle of your situation and maybe you're experiencing the frustration of how you keep going back to struggling with keeping your emotions in check or struggling with emotional outbursts, or struggling with the heightened anxiety or the heightened fear or the heightened depression, because it's really hard to calm ourselves down on our own. In fact, when we look at child development, we see that if children are not soothed first by a parent, that it's incredibly difficult for them later in life to self-soothe. So even kids, the way that they learn to handle when they're angry, when they're frustrated, when they're sad, is by someone teaching them and being there for them to help them regulate, to teach them how to soothe, so that then the child can learn and implement those self-soothing techniques. And so you might need that too. You likely do need that too Someone to help you learn how to calm down so that you can then do a better job at helping yourself calm down. So get calm and remain calm. Your emotions can help inform decisions, but you should not make emotional decisions. That is the key of this first step. So here's a poll for you On a scale of one to ten, how calmly are you handling yourself right now? That can help you get an understanding and an idea of where you are on the seven-step path.
Speaker 2:First step is to get calm. The second step is to get clarity. It is a mistake to make long-term decisions based on short-term feelings. This is what many people experience when they go to counseling, when they go to therapy. When they enter into that room with the counselor angry at their husband, upset at their marriage, not happy in their marriage, and then they begin to say things like I'm not happy, I don't know that. I want to be in this. Well, the way that counseling and therapy works is that most counselors and therapists end up helping the client to feel better about their situation and feel better about their life, and so if they're frustrated like when I was frustrated when I went 10 years ago and I was frustrated with my marriage and I didn't know what to do and my counselor just wanted to focus on my feelings. It made everything worse Because the more I thought about my feelings in the moment towards my husband, it clouded my judgment to really understand what the true issue was, because I was only seeing things through my lens and through my perspective and I have bias in my own situation. I have judgment towards my own situation. I will see things the way that I want to see them. That allows me to create the narrative in my head that I want to have. So let me explain a little bit more what that means.
Speaker 2:My husband so at that time, my husband was well. I did not know yet what the real issue was. What I saw was that my husband was incredibly angry all of the time at me and at a lot of other things, but of course, it came out towards me. So we were fighting a lot. He didn't want to be around me. When he would come home, we rarely spent time together. It was not the marriage that I signed up for. It wasn't the marriage that anyone would want to sign up for. We weren't just roommates. We were roommates that didn't like each other, and the more that he pulled away, the more I pursued him. The more I followed him, the more I would try and get him to open up and to talk to me or to love me or to just do anything with me, which continued to push him further away.
Speaker 2:Now, just saying that and not having further understanding of what the true issue was, without trying to get clarity, many people would look at that and say, well, that's not right. He's not acting right. You need to tell him the way that you want it to be. You need to tell him this, that or the other. Well, guess what? I had tried all of that. It only made things worse. And so in that moment I could have said I could have easily said this isn't what I signed up for. I want a divorce because my short term of feeling was I'm not happy and I wasn't happy, and that feeling should not be avoided. Our feelings do matter, as they are indicators that there's a deeper issue going on, but we should not make long term decisions based on that feeling.
Speaker 2:If you treat the symptoms but not the cause, it won't ever get better. See, the symptom that I saw was that my husband was detached, that he didn't want to be around me, that he was angry I assumed it me and his unhappiness in our marriage. But those were just the symptoms. I didn't have insight at that point into the true cause, which was that my husband had an addiction that he hadn't told me about, that he had struggled with for the first four years of our marriage, underneath his shame, underneath his own pain, underneath the fact that things were also stressful at work, and so that's why, when he came home, not only was he carrying this burden of the shame and embarrassment that he felt, but he also didn't feel like he was winning at work either, and the stress in his life from several things that had happened the loss of his grandmother, several other things that had happened were leading him to act out a certain way. His symptoms were one thing, the cause was something completely different, and if you only try and treat the symptoms, you'll likely end up making some mistakes that will end up thwarting your efforts and really trying to get to the root cause. So, on a scale of one to 10, how much clarity do you believe that you have on the real issue? Let me give you another example of this as you think about the answer to this question.
Speaker 2:Many times we have couples come to us where an affair is the issue that is bringing them to us. Many times we also have people who, while it is an affair that is the precipitating problem, it is the symptom that's bringing them to us they fail to look at what may have been happening in their marriage before that ended up leading to the affair. So we had a client one time who, of course, he came and it was his wife that was having an affair and he wanted to just lay down the rules. He wanted to set ultimatums. If you choose, you can either choose him or choose me, but you have to choose. I'm going to cut off your financial support, I'm going to cut off all of these things to you if you continue on in that affair.
Speaker 2:Now, affairs are never justified. There's never an excuse to have an affair. So hear that. Also, affairs are not always because something was wrong in the marriage. Please hear that.
Speaker 2:But in this specific situation, the woman had spent 10, 15 years in a marriage with a husband the husband that came to us who had been controlling her for 15 years, telling her what she could, what she couldn't do, how she should act, how she should dress, how she should do all of these things, and she finally not only got fed up with it, which of course she did but it led her open and vulnerable to when the guy at work began to notice her, began to talk to her, began to ask her questions, began to really see her as a unique individual that she began to feel respected, she began to feel liked, she began to feel loved. And so, while she did enter into an affair and that's never justified the real issue in that marriage was that the husband was incredibly controlling and so if he didn't have clarity that that was the real issue and he only saw the real issue as being the affair and he just looked at the affair as the problem and tried to solve for that, how much worse was he making it? She already felt controlled by him for years. It was the reason she really wanted out of the marriage. The affair was just a symptom. If he lays down the law, creates ultimatums, withholds finances from her, is that treating the symptom or is it treating the cause? It's making the symptom of the affair worse, but it's not treating the cause. That would ultimately need to change in order for her to come back.
Speaker 2:This is why you need to really get clarity. It doesn't just take into account what the current situation is. That is taken into account. But it's also what was your marriage like before? What were the issues that tended to come up over the years of your marriage? How did you act towards each other? How did you fight? How did you recover from fights?
Speaker 2:There's a whole analysis that needs to go into this to really understand where things began to break down. It's just like in our bodies when we begin to have symptoms, they are telling our bodies that something is wrong. Symptoms in your marriage are telling you that there's something wrong in your marriage, but it's not telling you what it's not until we go in and get the lab work done and get the analyses done and do the tests that need to be run, that we can really start working at the root cause of what is totally going on, or what is truly going on inside of the marriage, just like that's true of inside of our bodies. So, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much clarity do you have on the real issue? One person asks. So should I just ask what the real issue is? It is very likely that if you were to ask your spouse that they are not going to consciously know that answer off the top of their head. Because, again, we're looking at years, years of interactions and events and things that have happened in the marriage that have led to where you are today. On average, six years, according to the research, there's likely six or more years of problems that have been festering that are leading to the symptoms that you're seeing now but are not being dealt with.
Speaker 2:So how do you get clarity on the issue? You likely can't do it alone. I know that's what you don't want to hear. Likely, what? Not what you want to hear. But the truth of the matter is and I know this from both sides of it, I know it from being a person going through a marriage crisis who was trained to be able to put on a counseling hat I could not counsel myself. To this day, I cannot counsel myself and I don't try. It's ineffective and many times it only makes things worse because, again, I have a bias, you have a bias, we all have a bias into our own situation and wanting the story to be the way that we want the story to be, the way that our minds are trying to put it together, we cannot unbiasedly look at our situation and see it from every angle. Now you can do things. You can begin to ask some questions, do some things, but really it really takes the help of data, of analysis, of questions that help to dig deeper into what the true issue is. That we'll get to in just a minute.
Speaker 2:The third step in the seven steps to rescue your marriage is to stop pushing your spouse away and to start pulling your spouse closer. You see, if you don't have clarity on what the real issue is, you cannot effectively pull your spouse closer. Let's go back to the example of the guy whose wife was having an affair, but he was also incredibly controlling. If he doesn't have clarity into the fact that he needs to stop his controlling behaviors, then he cannot effectively pull his wife back closer to him because he will continue to push her away through his controlling behaviors, because that's what the real issue is. You have to get down to what the real issue is For me and my marriage.
Speaker 2:When I realized it wasn't that my husband was a complete jerk and hated me, it wasn't that he was broken, it wasn't that I had married the wrong person. It was that my husband was going through an incredibly difficult time in his life and I knew in my gut, something deeper was going on. I didn't know what my mistake was, that I didn't act towards my husband in empathy. I was focused more on what he was giving to me or the lack of what he was giving to me, and less on how I could be there for him, even if it didn't look like the way that I would have wanted him to be there for me, because we're two different people with two different personalities and two different behavioral styles, and so when I tried to make my husband be like me or think of my husband like that, it made everything worse. When I had clarity that the real issue was really that he was going through some extremely difficult things in his life, that it changed the way I thought about him something I never got from therapy. It changed the way I acted towards him. I became more empathetic to him and to his situation, and it ultimately ended up totally changing and revitalizing our marriage.
Speaker 2:If you don't have clarity on the real issue, you cannot effectively pull your spouse closer. What does that mean? Pulls and pushes are a basic concept that we talk about at Merit Helper, and pulls is when you evoke emotions that your spouse enjoys feeling, when you pull your spouse closer when just just think about it when you were dating your spouse, what were the things that he or she did that evoked the emotions in you that you loved feeling, that you enjoyed feeling For me? Oh, my goodness, my husband. He would open every single door, every one of them. He was the first guy I ever dated. That was the pristine Southern gentleman. He paid for all of my meals because he actually had money.
Speaker 2:I was in college and most of the guys I had dated before then in high school and college, they didn't really have much money, you know, but my husband, he was in the army and he had a decent paycheck and he would pay for my meals and he took care of me and he sent me flowers and he would send me text messages every morning before he would go fly because he was a pilot, and he would just tell me how much he loved me and, of course, I loved that and it pulled me closer to him. What were those things for you? What would your spouse say were the things that you did when y'all were dating that pulled them closer to you, were they wanted to be around you? Why did you stop doing those things? Because we do we all do we get in our routine, we stop prioritizing the relationship and we stop doing the things that pull our spouse towards us. Instead, we begin to evoke emotions in our spouse that they don't enjoy feeling, many times, that they hate feeling, and it ends up pushing them further away from us. Why did we start doing that? What are those things that you know that you do? Or if you were to ask your spouse, what are the things that I do that evoke emotions within you that you don't enjoy feeling?
Speaker 2:Is it that you're critical of everything they do? Is it that you don't appreciate the work that they put into things? Or, when they do do something for you, you fail to acknowledge what they've done? Or is it the fact that you make sly comments all of the time? Or, in public, you say things to embarrass them or to ridicule them or to put them down, and maybe you just think you're being funny. Maybe you think it's all in just, but it's never all in just. It's never all in good fun. People take those things personally and maybe that's something you're doing that, over time, has pushed your spouse away. Maybe it's that you tried to control the finances. Maybe it's that you tried to fill in the blank. I could go on forever.
Speaker 2:We tend to, over time, after the newness of the marriage and the relationship wears off and we begin to see our spouse's flaws, which we all have I do, you do, all of us have flaws, but it's when we begin to see those that then we want to fix those flaws, and that just pushes our spouse further and further away. We become critical, we begin to see them as a person that needs to be fixed, not as a person that needs to be loved, and no one wants to be in that kind of relationship. So we need to stop pushing our spouse away in step three and start pulling our spouse closer, based on what they see and perceive as a pull and what they see and perceive as a push, not what we do. People don't leave what they have unless they believe what they are going to is better. This is a working principle in premise that we work off of at Marriage Helper in every type of situation.
Speaker 2:If your spouse wants out of the marriage, it is likely because they believe that what they are going to is better, whether it is or not, whether it's a different type of lifestyle that they're going to or another person, or maybe it's just that they're trying to find peace and, for whatever reason, that peace for them means being away from you. If that is what is going on and it may not be that the peace part of it is but there's something out there. If you're not pulling your spouse towards you, something out there is pulling your spouse away towards it. It may be a person, it may be a work thing, but it's something that's pulling your spouse and if you don't have clarity on what that is, you need to start getting it. We can help with that, because people don't leave what they have unless they believe what they are going to is better. Be the better.
Speaker 2:The goal is that we are the better, not just to bring our spouse back. That's not the working reason. That's not the number one goal. It's because we want to be the best we can be, or I do. I can't speak for you. I want to be the best that I can be. I want to be the best mom. I want to be the best wife. I want to be the best CEO. I want to be the best podcast host that I can be. I want people to want to be around me because of how I treat them, not because of any other reason, not because they have to be, not because they feel like they'll get punished if they're not. I want people to truly enjoy my presence and that's not on them, it's on me to make sure that that happens. That's my responsibility in this world is to be the kind of person that people enjoy the way they feel when they're around me.
Speaker 2:I love the quote by Mother Teresa don't let people leave you until they are happier than when they came. Be the better. What would that look like for you? If you're waiting to do the things to start fixing your marriage until your spouse comes back, you're missing your chance. That's what I hear a lot of times. People will say, well, but why should I do this now? They don't even want to work on the marriage. I don't know that I want to put all the work and effort and time and money into this. If they're not on board right now, why would I do that? Because you can't suddenly become something you're not. There's a book that actually the whole team at Marriage Helper is going through right now, called Unreasonable Hospitality. It's a book about business and hospitality in the restaurant industry. You may be thinking why in the world is this coming up in our conversation about marriage?
Speaker 2:Will Godera was the co-owner of a restaurant in New York City, a Michelin star restaurant called Eleven Madison Park. At Eleven Madison Park they worked for years to try and get that coveted Michelin star. Not just that, but to become the number one restaurant in the entire world. What they realized was, when a food critic would come in, that they could wait and be on scout looking for that food critic day in and day out. When that food critic came, they could put the best waitress, the best chef, the best busboy, the best hostess on that food critic's experience. That wasn't really going to be what got them the New York Times, the number one restaurant, the Michelin stars that they wanted, because if you just wait to do the thing the minute that you're supposed to perform, you're not going to be able to do it. No athlete waits around until they're picked to be in the Olympics before they begin training for it.
Speaker 2:You cannot suddenly become something you're not If you're not working now to become the best that you can be, to learn the behavior changes that you need in order to have the best relationships possible, especially in your marriage. If you don't make that an intentional decision day in and day out of your life, then if and when your spouse comes back and decides to reconcile, you're not suddenly going to become something you're not. You're not going to drop the bad habits all of a sudden because your spouse is ready to reconcile. This is not one of those moments that you should say well, if they come back, then I'll work on stopping the addiction, treating people better, being nicer. No, you do it now because you can't suddenly become something you're not and you probably don't want to be that way. Anyway, this isn't just about your marriage and all of us think that it is. It's about you. It's about being the kind of person that people want to be around, and that's why it is important to start now, even when your spouse isn't on board.
Speaker 2:If I would have waited I am not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but if I would have waited for my husband to be willing to go to counseling with me or to do something with me, whatever that would have looked like for us, it wouldn't have looked like counseling. That was a disaster. But if I would have waited for Rob to say that he was in, that he was willing to change. I don't think it would have ever happened. He needed to know he was loved and accepted first, but he couldn't know that unless I became different, unless I changed the way that I showed up and treated him inside of our marriage. Because people see it. People see who you truly are.
Speaker 2:There was a meme that I shared on Instagram the other day and it said your true personality and who you truly are is identified in the way that you say representative when you're on the phone with a company, and it's hilarious because typically we're all like representative. I just want to speak to our representative, right? We're never sitting there, just totally calm, after waiting for 30 minutes on the line saying representative, please. It was funny. But the real key is who are you when your marriage isn't on the line? Because that matters. That's what we're really talking about.
Speaker 2:The behavior change that leads to long term results for your life and your marriage is a secondary result. On a scale of one to 10, how effectively are you pulling your spouse closer? It's not just about pulling your spouse closer, it's about becoming the best that you can be. But pulling your spouse closer is a secondary benefit. You're not alone If you feel like you are not effectively pulling your spouse closer, you're not alone, because likely no one has taught you how to have a good relationship. Maybe you didn't see it modeled in your parents. You likely didn't. We know from the research that half of you on this call at least had parents that divorced. Even more of you still had parents that you may not have seen modeled how to get through hard times. For those of you whose parents did divorce, it's really hard for you to have something to compare what a healthy relationship looks like. So I don't blame you. I don't blame you If you're not pulling your spouse closer. You just need a model of how to do it.
Speaker 2:These first three steps that we've talked about. The goal is for you to stabilize your relationship, to stabilize your marriage, to stabilize your own emotions for the greatest likelihood of reconciliation. These three things have to happen if your marriage is truly going to be reconciled. These three things have to happen if you're even wanting a shot at reconciliation, because your spouse isn't likely one day to just wake up completely, regret everything they've done and come running back to you if something doesn't begin to change. It's a basic psychological concept.
Speaker 2:We get in rhythms or dances with our spouse where they expect us to act one way and they expect themselves to react back a certain way. It's called a dance, so you get into the rhythm of I'm going to come home, he's not going to be happy that I'm not home on time, we're going to fight about it, we're going to go to bed angry and it's all going to happen the next day. That doesn't change until one person begins to change what they're doing in the dance. This is your opportunity to change your part of the dance, to stop reacting in the way your spouse is expecting, to stop reacting in a way that may be pushed them away to begin with and to instead begin acting in a way that is the greatest likelihood of pulling your spouse back. And you do that by calming down, getting clarity on the true issue and pulling your spouse closer. Calm down and remain calm. Get clarity on what's really going on and pull your spouse closer.
Speaker 2:These are the first three steps that have to happen to rescue your marriage. I know you want to talk about reconciliation. We aren't there yet If your spouse isn't willing to work on the marriage. We're not there yet. We're going to get there. It's step four, but these are the first three steps. This gives you the greatest likelihood of your spouse being willing to even look at the possibility of reconciliation. But there's actually something that you have to do even before these three steps. It's not step one, it's like the precursor before even getting on the seven steps to reconciliation. It's like the entry fee maybe. So to say, there's something that you have to do even before any of that and nothing else matters. Nothing else of what I just said matters until you do this next thing Make sure that you're ready to get married.
Speaker 2:Make sure that you're ready to get married, that you really want to save your marriage and commit to doing everything you can to save it. I said at the beginning, there's a lot of reasons and a lot of things up against you. If you're wanting to save your marriage People out there who aren't going to understand why you want to save it you have to decide, without the input of anyone else, that you really want to save your marriage and commit to doing everything you can to save it. Count the costs. If you do nothing, what will the next year of your life be like? And when I say if you do nothing, I mean if you just continue to go the course you're on right now and don't do anything to change for the better or to change your situation for the better, what will your life be like in the next year, in the next five years, in the next 10 years? How will it affect you financially to go through separation, splitting into two households, mediation at $450 an hour, divorce an average of $30,000, alimony, child support? There's so many costs that end up coming with divorce that are, of course, not all financial. Probably the easiest ones to deal with are the financial ones. What will happen to your friend group, your community? They likely don't know what to say and the ones who do aren't saying anything helpful. What will happen to your kids? How will divorce affect them in the next year, in the next five years, in the next 10 years, 20 years, 30 years? There was a guy who was 78 years old and he said my parents got divorced when I was a kid and it's still affecting me Now.
Speaker 2:There may be many of you saying this is completely defeating to hear. I don't want the divorce. I believe that when you do the work to save your marriage, even if your marriage doesn't get saved, which we at Marriage Helper will stand with you and work with you until marriage saved. That is our goal. But even if you do all the right things in your marriage still isn't saved. I believe that the ramifications of divorce on children they will not be as oh goodness, words what's the words? Detrimental when they have seen a parent do all of the right things and learn how to have healthy relationships. It minimizes some of the. There is a medical word I'm looking for and can't think of off the top of my head, but it hinders some of those negative ramifications of divorce.
Speaker 2:But these are things that you should think about. How will it affect your future to not try to save your marriage? There's a cost to saving your marriage and there's a much greater cost to end it. There's still a cost to save it. There's still the cost of your own emotions. There's the cost of your own commitment and dedication. There's the cost of how the roller coaster that many of you are on. There's the financial cost of doing things to help you work toward saving your marriage. Yes, there is a cost to save your marriage, but there is a much greater cost to end it. So what do you want to do? Are you committing to save your marriage. Your mindset, your commitment, your belief in saving your marriage is more important than your spouse being willing.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna say that again for the people in the back your mindset, your commitment, your belief in saving your marriage is more important than your spouse being willing. Why would I say that? Because if you aren't committed, it will never matter if your spouse is willing or not, because the first thing that comes up that is difficult or maybe not the first thing, maybe it's the fifth thing or the 10th thing, the next thing that comes up, that is finally the straw that breaks the camel's back. If you're not committed in realizing that this is a process that takes time. There's seven steps. I'm gonna be real with you. It likely takes people one to two years, maybe even three, to go through all of those seven steps.
Speaker 2:If you want it to stick, if you want it to last long-term, we're looking at one to three years. It's not an easy fix, it's not a quick turnaround, but it's doable, it can last and it is absolutely worth it. But if you're gonna just back out the second, it gets hard. Or if you don't really believe that you can do it, if your mindset is stopping you if you are surrounded by friends and family who are encouraging you to divorce, it's gonna hold you back. So, even if your spouse was willing, you wouldn't be able to make great progress until these things are in place. That's why it is the first thing that you need to decide before even starting the seven steps, and we can help you do that. Not commit, not decide. I mean hopefully, hopefully.
Speaker 2:If you want me to go on my diatribe and soapbox about how great marriage is for culture, for families, for children, the reasons that you should try and fight for your marriage, I'm happy to do so. But I believe that many of you understand that, and more than just how it affects the world and the economy and the nation and even your personal community, I think you understand the cost of losing your husband or losing your wife or your kids losing their parent, and not to death but to divorce, because it is a loss. You intimately understand how that feels right now and you don't want that. I believe that many of you on here are committed and that you have decided, but I don't know that you have fully understood what you're committing to, what it means to go down the path of saving your marriage how there's gonna be the continued ups and downs, the one step forward and 18 steps back, but then 20 steps forward again. You'll make progress but it'll be slow and it'll be over time and I can't guarantee you that at the end of the day it absolutely will save your marriage. I wish I could, but I can guarantee that the process that we teach and work with you to do at Marriage Helper will make your life better, will make your relationships better with your kids and oh my gosh, they probably need that right now with others, with your family members and, more than likely, with your spouse. We see it all of the time. We can help you calm down, get clarity and start pulling your spouse closer, and the rest of the seven steps too, we can help with. All of that I wanna share with you. These are three people who all did the work before their spouse was ready to work on the marriage.
Speaker 2:Meet Amber and her beautiful family. Amber, for 10 months, was learning the things to do to stop pushing her husband away, to begin pulling him closer, to understand what the real situation was, so that by the time that her spouse came back and they were able to go through one of our intensive couples workshops together, that it really had even more power, even more sticking power, because Amber had been doing the things that she needed to do. Meet Jordan in the middle His wife had left him, divorced him for another man, ended up getting pregnant with the other man's baby. You would think that all hope was lost right then and there. But Jordan understood these principles that we taught and ultimately his wife realized or his ex-wife at that point realized that this was not the life that she thought she was gonna have. She ended up calling him telling him that she had gotten pregnant, and he said, not knowing what to say, he said congratulations. And she said well, do you wanna hear the facts or do you wanna hear my heart? And he said I wanna hear your heart. They talked for three hours. Three hours because Jordan had learned how to become a safe place, how to do the things that stopped pushing her away and to pull her closer. They remarried. Look at all those kids. Look at all those kids that were there at that wedding day. All of them, but the youngest, because that was the one that, when she was born, just a couple of weeks after they remarried, it was Jordan's name. Who going on the birth certificate. I love that story. It makes me tear up every single time because Jordan did the work. He did the work before there was ever a glimpse at reconciliation. And their kids are ecstatic. Not only were they ecstatic the day of the remarriage, but to this day they're the ones who believe anything is possible, nothing is unrecoverable.
Speaker 2:And then we have Ryan and Ryan man. He, for at least a year, did the work. His wife wanted nothing to do with him. She was completely checked out, wanted out of the marriage. Ryan had things that he realized he needed to change. When he understood the clarity of what was really going on in his marriage, he realized a lot of it had to do with things he needed to do differently. And for a year he consistently did the work to change his behaviors, to change his heart. Ultimately, his wife Vanessa ended up agreeing again to try towards reconciliation. They came through. Our couples intensive, ended up saving their marriage. And to this day, ryan will tell you that the best thing that he did to save his marriage was to work on himself first, the most important thing that he did, because you can't suddenly become someone that you're not. And in these three situations. These three people realized the importance of that and began to do the work on themselves.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks so much for listening to this week's episode of it Starts With Attraction. If you enjoyed the episode, feel free to leave a review. If you're listening on podcasts, we love to hear from you. If you're watching on YouTube, feel free to leave a comment. We would love to hear from you as well.
Speaker 1:If you know of someone who might be experiencing marriage trouble, or anybody that you think might need to hear this, feel free to send it, share it with them, share it with a family member, a co-worker Again, anybody that you think might need to hear it. And, as I mentioned in the intro, we have an interesting opportunity for those that might be hosting a conference, a women's group, a personal development seminar, anything like that. If you go to kimberleaguebeamhomescom slash speaking, you can find a form there to sign up to have Kimberly come and speak at your events. So feel free to go there. Fill that form out, please serious inquiries only but if you're interested in having her speak at one of your events, you can do that. Again, that is kimberleaguebeamhomescom slash speaking. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode and until then, stay strong.