00:00 

Well, hey there. Welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 329, "Five Strategies for a Rotten Marriage." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:23 

Alright. Hello there, my friends. So glad to have you here today. Thanks for joining me on the podcast. I've got some good stuff for you. Before we jump in today, though, I want to let you know that I am going to be doing a holiday class. And I think I'm going to be doing it at two different times, one during the day and one time in the evening. We're going to be starting about the middle of November and going just until about Christmas. So it'll just be a six week class. Don't have the days down on that yet, but I will by next week. So this is just because holidays tend to be a little bit stressful and sometimes we get caught up in a lot of "overing." We overbuy. We overdecorate. We overplan. We over...like, all the things, right? We overeat. We do a lot of "overing" and it causes a lot of stress. We overdrama and there's people in our lives that we sometimes can really struggle to be around. And holidays bring up opportunities to be around them. 

01:21 

And so this is just a chance for us to talk about how do I keep my brain around this? How do I not overreact? How do I be the person I want to be in these situations? And so I think it's going to be a great, great class. So if you have not signed up on my website to get my emails, you're going to want to do that. If this is something you think you might be interested in, go to tanyahale.com. And I now have a pop up that shows up right away that asks if you want to subscribe to my "weekend win." And just go ahead and put your name and your email address on there and double check your email. Make sure that it's right so that you get these and and then just keep your eyes open for these classes as they come up. That is the first place that I let people know what's going on and when classes are available. So if you want to be the first to get signed up for those, make sure that you are getting my "weekend win." 

02:13 

And probably you're gonna want my "weekend win" anyway. If you like this content, the weekend wins are meant to be read in about two minutes or less, and they're different than what I do here on the podcast, so it's not the same content every week. But just a great little tidbit for you to go, "huh, haven't thought about that before, that's interesting," and that's my goal with those. They're just fun to put out and they're fun for you to read. 

02:36 

So, alright, let's go ahead and jump into today's topic. This is called Five Strategies for a Rotten Marriage. So, I loved Terrence Reel. The first book of his that I ever read was this last year in, I think I started reading it in January or February and was blown away. Loved it, loved it. Since then I've now read three of his books and I just think he does some good stuff. But in one of his books called "The New Rules of Marriage," he talks about five losing strategies that destroy our marriages. And so I wanted to talk about those five strategies today. Some of the concepts today, the five strategies for sure, are straight from his book. But you know me: I use his stuff, but I'm going to add a lot of my own examples, a lot of my own take on how it works. Excuse me if I cough a little bit today, I've had a bit of a cold. But just so you know, I think there's some really, really good content here. So let's just jump in. 

03:36 

So I don't know any of us that get married hoping to create something where we are really miserable. In fact, I think we all get married with the exact opposite in mind. We love this person. We want to create a happy, peaceful life with them where we raise children, where we build a legacy of love, where we enjoy our friendship, we get along, we have this great companionship and partnership going on. And somewhere along the way, whether it's three months in or five years in or 15 years in, some of us find ourselves struggling to have kind thoughts, to say kind things and to provide kind acts of service. We can struggle to feel connected and then even avoid spending more time than absolutely necessary with this person. We have become this version of ourselves that we often don't even recognize as we struggle to stay out of being offended or being hurt. 

04:30 

Instead of offering patience and grace, we can become temperamental, uptight, overwhelmed, anxious, angry, and on edge. We can feel attacked with just a glance from our spouse. We can feel thrown under the bus with just a word or a phrase and we can feel powerless to create something different. I know, as I look back on my difficult marriage, for me, it felt as though I was being inhabited by an alien. I was generally kind and accepting in many ways. I offered people grace. I was easygoing and an optimist who looked for and assumed best intent in others and who trusted easily. And yet, within the first year of my marriage, I found myself crying more than I had ever cried before in my entire life. I was assuming worst intent of most things that my husband was doing, and I felt lonelier than I ever had in my entire life. I was hurting. I was hurting so bad. I had never felt so dismissed or overlooked in my entire life, and feeling as though I was being treated as less-than and like I didn't matter hurt even more. 

05:41 

Now, to be clear, these were my thoughts. But they were so real and powerful to me. My husband and I were getting really really good at all five of these losing strategies that Terry Reel teaches. And although this isn't an all-inclusive list, it's a great place to start exploring our destructive and our dysfunctional tendencies. So let's jump in, shall we? 

06:05 

First strategy? Needing to be right. So I covered this concept pretty in depth a few weeks ago with number 326, "Stop Being Right and Start Being Safe." So we won't dig super deep on this one, but just as a reminder it can be so easy for us to get hung up on who is right and who is wrong on any given disagreement, big or small. And when we start focusing on who's right and who's wrong, we can't actually see the actual situation that needs to be cleared up. We move into adversarial positions rather than alliance positions. Being obsessed with who is right or wrong is setting us up for failure because immediately it pits us against each other. It makes us forget that this other person is someone that we love, someone that we want to cherish, someone with whom we really do want a deep relationship with. And yet our natural tendencies as humans is to want to be right and so we give in to this base desire of proving that we're right. We do it at the expense of the other person's dignity, at the expense of our connection and at the expense of our intimacy. But it's super subtle and we can really think that what we're arguing about really matters when in reality it rarely matters at all. 

07:26 

What really matters is that we are building connection, that we are helping the other person feel as though we care about them, their viewpoints, their experience, and that we're creating a safe space for both of us to grow and progress and expand. That we are showing up as partners, teammates who want each other to work together to create something bigger than ourselves. And so, instead of fighting for our relationship, we end up fighting about who is right and who is wrong. We lose our focus on what matters most. And if we do end up proving to our spouse that we are right, we leave them cowering in a corner, in a less-than space, and even less willing to step into equality and vulnerability and honesty the next time around. So we gotta watch that one. 

08:16 

Second losing strategy. Controlling your partner. Let's start off easy on this one, okay? Basically, you're trying to get your partner to behave in a way that makes your life easier. An idea that Terry Reel teaches is that we all marry our unfinished business. Meaning, for whatever reason, we find ourselves intuitively drawn to a partner who fits very comfortably into the dysfunction of our current lives or our lives growing up. If we had a parent who behaved in a certain way that made us crazy, our primitive brain intuitively seeks for a person who feels familiar, who has the capacity to show up in that same way. So, the unfinished business of learning to handle our parents in an emotionally mature way shows up in our partner, and we get the opportunity to finish up that business. So as Terry Reel says, "a good relationship is not one in which the raw parts of ourselves are avoided. A good relationship is one in which they are handled, and a great relationship is one in which they are healed." 

09:27 

All of us come from dysfunctional homes, places where we learned coping mechanisms that are hurtful and destructive, and a marriage has the potential to be a place where we can heal from these maladaptive behaviors and step into something much sweeter and beautiful. The biggest challenge to this is our natural tendency to want our partner to change in order for us to feel better. Because of course it's much easier to manage our difficult emotions if they change their behavior than if we have to learn to manage our own minds. It's such a normal human tendency to see the other person as the problem to our discomfort. So in very subtle, and sometimes not so subtle ways, we seek to control them, to get them to behave in a way that feels more appropriate and loving to us. 

10:18 

To add to the complexity of this, we often don't even see that. We see our controlling behaviors as us being helpful. We really believe that we are being helpful to the other person when actually we're really trying to control them. Oftentimes we just don't even see it. But as we talk about often here on the podcast, we just can't control others. We try. Boy, how do we try. And it always ends with more misery than we started with because we still have the difficult circumstances. And now we've added on a huge spoonful of disappointment and aggravation and annoyance that the other person just won't get in line. I know that whenever I have someone trying to control me, that I can get pretty angsty. I push back. I emotionally disengage. I might even get passive aggressive and say "yes" to them to get them off my back and then do my own thing anyway. And I don't think I'm alone with my resistance. Yours may look different, but people resist being controlled and they will use whatever means they have learned cognitively or subconsciously over the years. They will use whatever they know that works for them. 

11:37 

Terry Reel makes an interesting point about these first two losing strategies. Here's what he says, "the first two losing strategies, needing to be right and controlling your partner, can combine to produce a benevolent despot. When men adopt this stance, they tend to be explicitly professorial and patronizing. When women adopt this stance, they tend to be the power behind the throne. A man is the head of the family, but the woman is the neck and the neck moves the head. So for both sexes, when you combine needing to be right with control, you always assume that you know what's best for your partner better than he does. It's always one up and intrinsically condescending." 

12:25 

So third losing strategy. Unbridled self-expression. Basically, this is the idea that you can say anything you want, any way that you want in the context of venting or clearing the air. The idea is that we have to be completely honest and not hold back. Now, y'all know that I am a huge fan of no back burner issues and being honest. And I always talk about approaching these issues from a place of kindness and compassion. It is never a free for all, "let me tell you how horrible you are and why." Take note of the adjective that Terry uses, "unbridled," in connection with self-expression. This also aligns with the "rock the boat but don't create a tsunami" concept that I've taught you in the last few weeks. We need to have discussions. We are humans after all. Humans are messy and therefore relationships will be messy. It's all part of the gig. But these messes have got to be cleaned up. But we don't clean them up by creating a bigger mess or by just continuing to sweep the chunks of mess back and forth, back and forth, right? We need to learn to be intentional in what we share and how we share it. Allowing ourselves to get whipped up into a fury day after day, month after month, year after year about the same issue is not helpful and it doesn't move you forward in your relationship. 

13:55 

Of course your spouse will do things that hurt you, or annoy you, or frustrate you. They are a human. And of course you need to feel the painful impact of their choices. That's part of what being a human is as well. And at some point we have to move through our hurt and decide to move on and heal. If we never choose to move forward, we can keep ourselves stuck in the pain of an affair, physical or emotional, or the pain of a lie, or whatever it is that hurts for years. If every day we wake up and pick the same scab and tell ourselves the same story about how they've hurt us and how horrible they are, we will never create a space in our heart for forgiveness and for moving forward. And years later we can still be waking up every day, venting about how their behavior has ruined your life. 

14:51 

Now, I'm not talking about taking time to lick your wounds, to put your hands on your knees and catch your breath when something difficult happens. But we cannot stay there indefinitely. When we do, we move from being someone who has been hurt and needs time to heal, to someone who is choosing to be a victim, to being someone who has gone from being the victim to someone who is then victimizing someone else. So yes, feel the feels. Be angry, be frustrated, be hurt, and then choose. Choose to move forward. We're not saying forget about the incident, because guess what? Your brain doesn't do that. Your brain won't forget. But at some point we have to allow the other person to repent, to change their ways, and to move forward as well. This person you're married to though is somebody that you love. It is someone you have chosen to be in your life. And it's important that we treat them as though we really value them. 

16:01 

Sometimes we forget that part. Our primitive brain is so freaked out about protecting us from any perceived threat that it goes a little berserk and swears it will never trust them again. If that's really the stance you are in and that you want to take, I'm going to suggest it may be time to get out of the marriage because it is no longer a marriage if you swear you will never trust them again. You will never be able to let go of this. Part of a working marriage is learning to have tough discussions, clean things up, forgive one another, and move on. So self-expression? Yes, absolutely. Unbridled self-expression, where you go on and on and call them names and stay in victim mentality for a very, very long time? Not helpful. 

16:55 

Alright, fourth losing strategy. Retaliation. The thing that makes retaliation, or revenge, as we may call it, so enticing is that we can convince ourselves that the other person deserves what we are dishing out. We are not only mean to the other person, but we are also mean-spirited. So direct retaliation, which is being mean, says and does mean things. Many of us are cognizant of our behavior and our desire to be Christlike, that we refrain from doing mean things. We won't outright put poison in their oatmeal. But many of us resort to being mean-spirited or indirect retaliation, which is where we don't say or do something that would be helpful or kind. This is more like an omission kind of sin. We withhold kindness and praise. We dismiss. We pretend we don't see their pain. All of this can be described as passive-aggressive, being mean, but going through the back door to do it. When we engage in retaliation, it is almost always because we see ourselves as victims. Terry Reel describes it as this: "if you hit me, I get to hit you back twice as hard with no shame or compunction because, after all, I'm your victim." So we often teach our children that just because someone is mean to us doesn't mean that we get to be mean back. And yet we often don't apply this same concept to ourselves as adults, especially in our marriages. Regardless of how anyone treats us, we get to choose to respond in ways that will shore up our own self-respect. 

18:43 

When I taught middle school, I hated having substitute teachers. Now, I'll be honest, I loved my days off. And sometimes I really needed a sick day or even a mental health day. But those eighth graders were rough on subs. And when I returned, I almost always had to have discussions about treating others with respect because the sub just had such a horrible experience with them, to which I would always get the argument from these sweet kids: "But they were mean. They didn't deserve our respect." And that idea just burns me up. The longer I taught, the better I got at doing this. But I would take the opportunity to respectfully teach them that we don't treat people with respect because other people deserve it. We treat people with respect because we are respectful people. Regardless of how others treat us, we still get to show up in a way that feels in alignment with who we are and who we want to be. We can be kind in the face of unkindness. We can respect them even when they're not respecting us. 

19:52 

Now whether those sweet kiddos figured this piece out or not, I don't know, but almost every time we had a sub, this was a discussion we would end up having. We get to show up in a way that creates self-respect, in a way that feels amazing to us and to our conscious brains. Our unconscious brain, our primitive brain, will seek for retaliation almost every time. And this is when we get to use our prefrontal cortex, our thinking brain, our conscious brain, to choose how to behave, how we ultimately want to. So our primitive brain thinks that it is protecting us through retaliation, but what really protects us is behaving in self-respecting ways and setting very clear boundaries that will protect us in the future. 

20:40 

When we humiliate, shame, ridicule, or try to tell our partner what they should be doing, we are being verbally abusive. If you are mad or hurt, have a conversation about it by going in through the front door. Be direct and honest while also choosing not to be hurtful. Don't act out your anger or hurt. Talk about it instead, using helpful strategies that I've taught you like owning your own. 

21:12 

Okay, the fifth losing strategy. Withdrawal. So withdrawal comes in many different forms. It can be a huge act like leaving the home and moving into an apartment, or it can be a slow decline in sexual intimacy or engaging in more and more dismissive behaviors. Withdrawal can sometimes meant to be punishing, like slamming a door and disappearing for a few days, or it can be motivated by just not wanting to retaliate. A fear of conflict, a mistrust of closeness, a reluctance to be vulnerable, a sense of futility, or even just fatigue. But whether it's quick and punishing or slow, calculated, and intuitive, however it shows up, we find ourselves moving farther and farther away, emotionally and even physically withdrawing in an effort to protect ourselves. 

22:15 

Sometimes this occurs in the whole relationship, and sometimes it occurs in certain areas such as our sex life or parenting or money issues, which then is going to bleed into all the other areas. And we're not talking about biggies here, like abuse in any form. We're talking about regular people working to figure out relationships. Our primitive brain very easily goes into protective mode, and we have to be cognizant of the behaviors it pushes us toward and intentionally choose whether that's the direction we want to go. When your husband says something thoughtless and hurtful, intuitively you may want to withdraw, to close yourself off, to emotionally or even physically distance yourself so that you feel safe. But when we slow down, when we seek to remember that this is a person we love, who is human and who will make mistakes, and that they are also a person who loves us, who would never hurt us on purpose, when we assume best intent, rather than worst intent, we can push against the primitive brain response to withdraw and engage instead, in a healthy conversation about the situation. 

23:29 

And sometimes in relationships, our partner just doesn't have the capacity at the moment to be the person we would like them to be in the relationship. But it's not because they don't love us or want a good relationship with us, but for reasons such as previous trauma or mental illness, or long-standing adaptive behaviors and patterns of behavior that they are not even cognizant of. This is the time that we get to move into acceptance of what is. Now, acceptance can look like withdrawal, and we might get them confused, but there is a major difference. Withdrawal is seething with resentment. Resentment is that underlying feeling in our heart that shuts down feelings and acts of love. It will cause us to be passive aggressive, to say and do hurtful things, to go into protective mode without abandon, to go into the place that says it's not worth the fight to keep the peace rather than be a peacemaker. Resentment in our hearts pushes out love. 

24:36 

Acceptance, on the other hand, is not rooted in resentment but rather rooted in love. I love this person and they are not capable for whatever reason at this point to meet me here. And then discussions and boundaries can be made and had from that place. But it's a place of love rather than a place of fear or anger or resentment. We stay engaged with conversations, with boundaries, and with kindness. We don't disengage with resentment and withdrawal. It's also important to be aware that there are times that we do need to distance ourselves. Now, not from a place of resentment, but from a place of self care. And again, we work to communicate what is going on. For example, it's okay if you need to walk away from a difficult discussion if you are struggling to regulate your emotions, but storming out of a room, slamming the door, and disappearing is not helpful. That is withdrawal. Appropriate distancing would be saying, "I'm having a tough time showing up here the way that I want to. I'm going to go for a walk, get my wits about me, settle down, rethink where I'm at, and I'll be back in 20 or 30 minutes, and then I would love to be able to continue our discussion." Or instead of a curtain, "no," when your spouse says they would like to talk, you can respond with something like, "now just isn't a good time. I'm a little wound up from my interactions with our son this afternoon. How about later tonight when I've had time to process it more?" Basically, you're saying, "no, here's why, and here's when I can." 

26:20 

Remembering that you love your spouse enough to have clear and concise conversation is a vital element to keeping you on track and connected. And it's because you love them that you are working to figure all of this out to show up more loving and kind with more grace and more forgiveness. So pay attention to your go-to strategies. I'm sure I'm hoping that as we went through this that you were able to identify what you do and how you do it and when you do it what it looks like. Notice when your primitive brain screams "protection, slow down," engage your prefrontal cortex, and behave more intentionally in loving and kind ways, setting boundaries when appropriate, and lean into your relationship with healthy behaviors rather than leaning out by disengaging and shutting down. You can do this, my friend. This is the most beautiful part of growing up into the middle-age. I think at this point we have so much experience behind us that we can see and understand all of these concepts in ways that previously were not available to us. 

27:33 

Now, if you are struggling doing this, this is what coaching does. I would not be where I am without coaching. There's so much good content here on the podcast, absolutely. There are people who can just need some small tweaks and adjustments. There are also people who need some pretty big major overhauls. Either way, your progress will be so much faster with a coach than without, and here's why. Because I will see things that you don't see and I will pull them out and put them in front of you, and then you have to figure out what to do with them. Is it an uncomfortable situation? Sometimes. Oftentimes my clients, the first three weeks or so, maybe four weeks, they're like, "man, I don't even like you." And I'm like, "listen, my job is not for to have you like me. My job is to show you where you're breaking down, to show you where your dysfunctional behaviors are so that you can choose to adjust them if you want to, so that you can create something healthier within yourself and therefore create something healthier in the relationships in your life." So my job is to tell you the truth and sometimes the truth is hard to hear. But until we see the truth, we cannot move forward. 

28:54 

So if you struggle to see the truth, if you struggle to see where your responsibility lies in your relationships, if you are stuck on, "it's all my husband," or "it's all my wife," then it's especially important that you find somebody in your life like me who can help you by saying, "no, let's take a look at that. Let's look at your part and see where your part in this comes up," because I promise you have a part regardless of what's going on in your marriage. You have a part and until you clean it up you cannot get to a better place. And this is all about as we get ourselves more in alignment with who we are and who we really want to be and with the values that we hold dear, then our self-respect takes a jump for the positive. This is about self-respect. This is about creating inside of you the kind of person that you really want to be. It's amazing work. 

29:56 

So if you want to if you want to sit down and chat with me, I'm doing 90 minute consults these days. It's an opportunity for you to get some good coaching. We coach for about an hour, sometimes more, and then we talk about coaching and what working with me would look like, what it would sound like, all the things about it. I can answer all your questions, and so keep that in mind. Also I am doing some days that I'm calling "Talk with Tanya." It's going to be the second Tuesday of every month at 12 o'clock mountain, two o'clock eastern and I'm not exactly sure how you get that except for on my social media at this point. But you can sign up to come to this webinar. You'll be sent a link and it's really just an open free-for-all. You can come on. You can ask me any question that you have. You can get a little bit of free coaching if there's enough, you know, a small enough amount of people. And where this is a brand new thing that I'm doing, I'm not having a lot of people show up yet, so this might be a great opportunity as well for you to just jump in and ask some questions. Or maybe you've been working on a concept, or there's something that I teach that you would like to understand deeper...it's a great opportunity for you to show up to Talk with Tanya and let's talk about it. I'll help you understand it better and help you see how it is working or not working in your life and what you're doing. 

31:21 

So that's going to do it for me today. Thanks for being here. Love this work. Love what this creates in our lives and I have to tell you I love the relationship that all this work is creating for me. It just feels magical and I just can't believe what is available to us when we're willing to do the work. Have an awesome, awesome day my friends and I'll see you next time. 

31:47 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya!