Fighting for God's Best in Your Marriage – I

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Gabe Lyons: And the light came on for me, Jim, when I could start to see these eight emotions as gifts from God because I grew up in a home where crying was off-limits. You don't do that.
John Fuller: That's Gabe Lyons, and he and his wife Rebecca are our guests today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. They're going to offer tools for couples to understand your emotions and to connect with each other better and more deeply. Thanks for joining us, I'm John Fuller.
Jim Daly: John, I had the chance to speak to Gabe and Rebecca at a conference in Nashville earlier this year, and they shared some powerful insights about the ways your past could still be affecting you and causing conflict in your relationship. If you just stop and think about that, I think you could probably identify two or three things in your relationship that your past is affecting. We're all going to hear more from them, how to process those experiences with your spouse specifically.
John Fuller: Gabe and Rebecca are speakers, writers, and co-hosts of the podcast called Rhythms for Life. They joined you, Jim, to talk about their book *The Fight for Us*. We've got details about the book online. Here now, the conversation with Gabe and Rebecca Lyons.
Jim Daly: Gabe and Rebecca, welcome to Focus on the Family. It's good to have you back.
Gabe Lyons: Thank you for having us. We love being with you.
Jim Daly: Now, you know, one of the key things, this is a great marriage book, a great life book, *The Fight for Us*. I love the idea of fighting for your marriage. It feels like too few of us in the Christian community are willing to do that. So let me ask that bigger question. Why do we give up so easily? Why is our divorce rate 35-40% in the Christian community?
Gabe Lyons: Well, I think people get discouraged easily. I mean, it's hard, right? Marriage has conflict in it. You have arguments with your spouse. You start to get narratives in your head.
Jim Daly: Really? I've never experienced that.
Rebecca Lyons: I know. We though are professionals at fighting. Which felt fitting to write about fighting because I do think we see the reason why even Christians walk away is that we see each other as the enemy instead of the ultimate enemy who is really trying to divide us. The only power the enemy has over us sons and daughters is he accuses and then gets us to agree. He might say or plant an intrusive thought that says Gabe is not attentive to your needs, he's suppressing you or dismissing you, he's transactional. And then I'll be like, hmm, that hurt or that felt that way. And so I'll internalize that and then I'll ruminate on it and all of a sudden it grows.
Jim Daly: It's so interesting you write about unhealthy conflict patterns. I mean, this is it. This is where everybody needs to lean in because every marriage experiences that. There's just things that we do that we learn from our childhood typically that we build on in our adult years, these unhealthy conflict patterns. What was happening for you particularly, Rebecca, where you were experiencing that with Gabe?
Rebecca Lyons: So, we had something that we had cultivated without intention called the dysfunctional dance. It was triggered by these emotions and it was silent, intense, avoidant, and anxious. And the more we talked to other couples about it, we found this was a trend. The silent was always triggered by hurt, like some form of hurt that was never expressed or repaired that started to grow into resentment or bitterness. And so we just kind of said, agreed with it is what it is and we moved on. The intense one is the one that really was ours. We're good at this one. And that's triggered by anger. The scriptures say in your anger do not sin. So it's okay to go, there could be a righteous anger around some of the things that we feel like we might not be honoring in one another or recognizing well in one another. But again, anger unexpressed is toxic. It becomes rage, it becomes depression, it becomes all kinds of things. And so we have to express it. The intense one is one, and as we've polled so many marriages, intense is like the top one and silent is second. So those extremes, but there's also avoidant and anxious. Avoidant is triggered by guilt and anxious is triggered by fear. And so these are all stress responses and they happen so much in the margins, the transitions. Because the bottom line is we're rookies. Like we've never before kids had kids, we never had special needs kids until we entered that, we had never done a cross-country move and then the stressors there, and then launching kids and kids getting married and going off to college. And we realized that we saw every transition differently based on our origin, which created stress, which created conflict because we're rookies.
Jim Daly: How long have you been married? You're not rookies.
Rebecca Lyons: 28 years, but I just felt like the first time we tried everything in whatever season we were in, we missed each other a little bit. So we've learned.
Jim Daly: Which is good, and you know, people are hearing the definitions and kind of, okay, that's me, that's my husband, whatever. I do feel like there can be some gender application to this. I'm not sure, but I look at the silent marriage. I would have thought that was first though, but you're saying the intense marriage is first.
Rebecca Lyons: Right. Or maybe they recognize that and then they grow silent over time.
Jim Daly: Right. There's not any one thing, you just don't fall in one bucket and stay there. But the silent marriage I kind of see as a husband's domain because we're little boys, I don't know that we truly ever emotionally grow up. So when we are wounded or we're frustrated, we tend to pull out of the battle. Gabe, was that your experience?
Gabe Lyons: That's true. And I think for men, we want to de-escalate. We don't want to get so angry and puffed up. So we tend to just turn inward. And it's intimidating when your wife's really great with emotions, understands emotions, can communicate to you the hundred different emotions she's experienced over the last few days. And yet as a husband, I know there was many times I was at a loss of words. I didn't have the same feelings, the same emotions. That would lead her to feel disconnected because I couldn't relate. And so I think for a lot of men, this journey towards understanding our feelings, realizing that they're valuable, they're not just soft things that you should avoid or you should press down, but you should learn how to express them. Because when I started to do that, that's when we began to have better conversations. I'm still not an expert the way Rebecca would be. But I think most husbands need to feel comfortable like you're probably never going to be that. But to just spend some time and energy learning how to relate is going to open up a whole new dimension of the relationship instead of going silent. Because when we go silent, what happens is we stop talking. And Rebecca and I have learned this time and time again: if we're not talking, we're not healing. And so a marriage that stops talking over time, the silence becomes resentment, the resentment becomes contempt. And as we know from Gottman and others, contempt is the marriage killer. And so we want to avoid that at all costs by getting the conversation moving again.
Jim Daly: I can appreciate that, and I think men, we struggle. A vulnerable example of that: Jean's second brother committed suicide probably four years ago. And it was one where it was heavy, rightfully, understandably. But as the months went by, I remember talking to Jean and my experience in life was losing my mom at nine and my dad at 11. You've got to pick yourself up, you've got to go because we can't just sit here. And she was grieving. I remember saying to her, I remember exactly where we were standing in the kitchen and I was giving her that speech. The husband's speech: we've got to get up, we've got to go, we need to deal with this. And she just looked at me and said, you know Jim, not everybody's wired like you. I'm not wired like you. And you've got to choose to sit in this grief with me or just keep moving. And it scared me. It literally was like one of the few times in my life I was fearful. Like what do I do? I didn't know what to do, Gabe.
Gabe Lyons: As husbands we do freeze in those moments. We know we're supposed to be feeling something, but you're like, is this on? And I remember in a counseling session I was having at one point, having a conversation, the counselor just asked me a simple question about how I was feeling about our marriage and our family. I responded and he says back to me, Gabe, I feel like I'm talking to an Excel spreadsheet. And I go, well wait, is that a compliment? I mean, I love Excel spreadsheets. I can do a budget, I love analyzing logic. And he goes, no, this is not a compliment. Like that distance between your head and your heart, if we can't work on that to where when Rebecca's expressing need, you can't meet her in that space, then there's going to always be a disconnect. And that really began a journey for me of deciding I'm going to better understand emotions so I can at least start that journey towards better connection with my wife.
Rebecca Lyons: Emotion is energy in motion and it's given to us by God. You think of David, God's bestie, a man after his heart. And if David wasn't emotional, I don't know who was. Because he lamented before God, he praised, he danced, he rejoiced. And I think there was a fullness because out of the heart, he wasn't betraying the heart. And when we suppress emotion, we betray our hearts. But the scriptures tell us that out of the heart the mouth speaks and it's the wellspring of life. So it's the source of life. And so recognizing that the heart needs to be in tune, it's part of the soul, the mind will and the emotions, that it needs to be in tune with the spirit and going, oh, grief. If Jesus was a man of sorrows well acquainted with grief, then grief and living through grief, he comforts us so we can comfort others. This is part of God's design. And so I think part of it is a recovery of that not in a way that emasculates men, but gives them the fullness of understanding there is a wellspring that comes from our recognition of that emotion.
Jim Daly: There's also a deep honesty with what I see David, as humanity. He seems to be a really straightforward honest person. And you often have to ask yourself, I have: Lord, he made the big errors and yet you say he has a heart after you. How do I reconcile that, Lord? And I think it's in the space you're saying.
Rebecca Lyons: Well, he withheld nothing from God. It was all out there. And vulnerability is risk. And I think for men and for women, that can be the reason why we don't go there because maybe we were vulnerable in our past and we were betrayed or silenced.
Jim Daly: All the things that create that.
Rebecca Lyons: And so then that puts that wall up like you, I could understand, as a child, I needed to disassociate for survival. But sometimes the skills we learn as children don't serve us as adults.
Jim Daly: Definitely not.
Rebecca Lyons: So it's coming back to that younger version of yourself and going, how does God want to continue to reveal what he wants to heal even as I become an adult?
Jim Daly: So with the silent marriage, the intense marriage, the avoidant marriage, the anxious marriage, and you know, I think people need to get a copy of the book to read more about that, we're not going to cover it all right here. But how do we avoid those behaviors so that we have a stronger marriage? Just the million-dollar question in the first 15 minutes here.
Rebecca Lyons: It's basically what we call notice and name. Because there is an emotion behind our triggered reaction. So often we focus on behavior management. We erupt or we're silent, we finally come back together and I'm like, I'm sorry for how I handled that. But we never go to root cause. Like why was that so triggering? Why is this topic on money so triggering, or sex so triggering, or parenting so triggering to me? There's probably, in psychology, that popular phrase says everything hysterical is historical. So where has this bumped up against us in the past that has been a trigger that we kind of really respond to? The amygdala goes offline, fight-flight-freeze, all the cortisol is, that stress hormone is surging, it takes four hours to leave our system. We've got to get to the root cause and so what we have encouraged a lot of people to do: when you take 15 minutes apart you de-escalate, you get with the Lord. God, show me what you want me to know about this. Is there more to this topic that just keeps becoming friction for us? And then coming back and asking God to just show us places of pain, places of wounding in our past that he wants to heal so that when we talk about parenting, we're in unity. When we talk about money, there's an honoring and a showing of empathy to one another because our origin stories didn't look the same, which does now reflect in why we see things differently.
Jim Daly: And so much of what you're saying for some people, wow, that sounds like a lot of work. And it is, but it's good work.
Rebecca Lyons: It's confession. It's like a rhythm of confession.
Jim Daly: And the intimacy gained in that is what the goal is, right? That you are one flesh.
Gabe Lyons: If you have a vision and understand, God gave me Rebecca because she was going to likely be the healing agent in body. He was going to use to help me grow closer to him, to better understand my story, my blind spots, instead of seeing her as the enemy. This is what happens in the fight. We see each other as the enemy versus recognizing if she's curious, which she's been with me, like she's asked me better questions than anybody's ever asked me about my childhood, about the story I've lived, which helps reveal to me all kinds of new things with someone with insight that I need to unpack and process and bring to God. And then I can do the same with her. I can bring curious questions. And so we invite couples to say instead of the stalemate, let's re-enter the relationship with curiosity understanding that what's going on behind the dance is deep pain, deep hurt, and you're the person, you're the one that God can use to help reveal and help see that healed.
Jim Daly: Now you've written the book so I get to ask these questions. There's an example of that in the book that you talked about, I think in the area where you allowed busyness and distractions to keep you from connecting with Rebecca. So I could say amen to this.
Gabe Lyons: Well, I call the dopamine of distraction. We get that dopamine hit from activity, production, and that was kind of how I've went through my life, my career was just I stayed busy. I always had something on the calendar, didn't like a lot of time to just sit idle or quiet. And that's what was ultimately tipping me up in our marriage because I wasn't creating the space for Rebecca and I to have time for those types of intimate conversations. These conversations do take time. It is work. And many of us just want to avoid it like I did. So playing golf was way more fun for five hours than sitting with Rebecca and having a deep dialogue about my history growing up and the trauma related to that that I experienced that was impacting us. And so I think as we move into this, especially as men, we want to just take account that we're giving the time necessary to this relationship. That we're saying we're going to prioritize our relationship. And we encourage couples to look at the next year ahead and say we're going to give this a year of just investment, of higher priority, maybe canceling some other things on the social calendar and giving ourselves some space to do this kind of work together.
Jim Daly: One thing that is helpful is having good friends that can help you in that way. And this fits here. I was going to talk to you about this a little later. But I have a friend Randy and we were just talking about that intimacy and how to develop that emotional intimacy with your wife because it is a stumbling block for us. We can go play golf for five hours, come home and Jean will say to me, so how's Bob's marriage? Because they're struggling. And I'll say, yeah, it never came up. But he does have a new driver. Exactly. Five hours, and his life didn't come up? Yeah. Who wants to talk about that? But that's part of it. So this friend Randy, he and I were talking about how to deepen that emotional moment and he said to me, well why don't you treat that time with Jean like you would prep for a broadcast? And I went, whoa. Because I spend time reading a book, looking at questions that are prepared, all the connections of that. I know your story because I've been briefed and read it. And I thought what a great example for me at least in what I do to have that same intensity to do prep.
Gabe Lyons: I do that too, Jim. I will now on my iPhone I'll put in the notes questions to ask Rebecca when we're having dinner one night. And it feels dumb to do that. Why do I still have to do this? But I think guys need to feel that permission like when you hear an interesting thought or you're learning or you're listening or reading a book, think about a question you could discuss as a couple. This for Rebecca does enliven the relationship. It shows interest into her. The definition some have used of intimacy is 'into me you see'. And you can only do that through some good conversation.
Jim Daly: That's so good. Let me ask you about the list of emotions since we're putting out the list of questions. I mean, list of emotions that we need to be aware of that we can communicate better. What do you think, Rebecca?
Rebecca Lyons: Well, we take this from Dr. Chip Dodd in his book *The Voice of the Heart*. And the eight primary feelings are hurt, lonely, sad, anger, fear, shame, guilt, and glad. Gabe would have thought that I was an ocean of emotion with a thousand feelings because of all of those eight, they each kind of encapsulate. It's kind of like the notes on the scale, the primary notes or the four primary colors. There's so many things that come under that. Like you say what are you feeling, he's like, I'm frustrated. I'm like, well that's under anger. But often we don't know what we're feeling. And there were years where I'd ask Gabe like what do you feel, he's like, I don't know. Like he wouldn't even be able to name one or recognize. He's like, I'm not feeling anything. I'm like, well you seem kind of frustrated, you seem angry. He's like, no I'm not angry, I'm just frustrated. So it just felt like a little bit of a loop. But the emotions are being triggered by something. And again like we said, if it's something historical then maybe we've had this fight for a while. Or maybe, I would just give an example for us like the feeling of fear. The fear, there's an impairment to every emotion Dr. Chip says, but then there's also a gift. So fear, the impairment is anxiety. It's imagining a future without God in it. But the redemption of fear, the scriptures say the fear of the Lord is a beginning of wisdom. So a named and confessed fear to Gabe goes from anxiety that might be ruminating in my head to wisdom on how can we come together around something that's concerning.
Gabe Lyons: The light came on for me when I could start to see these eight emotions as gifts from God because I grew up in a home where crying was off-limits. You don't do that. Well, he was told it means you're feeling sorry for yourself. And so if you grow up like a lot of people did, I mean our parents didn't have these emotional health conversations, most of them didn't. There wasn't a language for this. A lot of our parents were in the silent generation, they just did their work, provided for the family, and that's how you did it. I think for me to understand emotions are actually a positive that God's given us, even though they might sound negative. Sadness. I don't want to feel sadness. Well, I should feel sadness. I feel sad that my mother passed away recently. That's appropriate. Sadness is honoring the memory of someone. Or anger. Anger is passion. Like most of us do the work we do, like you lead Focus on the Family because you're angry about the state of the family in the world and you want to do something about it. So instead of seeing all these as negatives, the moment I could realize wait, no, these are gifts meant to lead towards relationship. And if I can know how to express them, Rebecca and I are going to walk through feelings together, it can help. And so we try to walk people through that in the book, especially men. I mean, I write half the book, Rebecca writes half the book, but some of these chapters I really took on a tone so that men would feel heard and understood and women and wives would better understand the ways sometimes we as men just struggle with these things and how we need grace and patience. Rebecca had a lot of grace for me in the process as I kind of tripped over my words and tried to express feelings and that was really helpful for me not to create some shame about it, but to actually start to learn how to do it better.
Jim Daly: Right. Guilt is conviction. But we could hide in toxic shame or we can confess the conviction and then experience the freedom. And that's so good. Most of this is the tools to be able to do this, right? It's and what we found, we have something called Hope Restored, which is a four-day intensive, it can be tailored for different days etc. but the one that is the workhorse is a four-day intensive. It's like 36 hours of counseling right in a row. Sunday night, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday lunch. It has a post-two-year 81% success rate and about 30% of the couples coming already have divorce papers in hand. What's so interesting about that and the predictability of it, it's exactly what you guys are saying. Sunday is rough, Monday is rough, Tuesday is rough because all the stuff is coming out. Stuff that the couples don't even know about each other. And then Wednesday the healing starts, Thursday the Holy Spirit just stamps it. And I think that's why it's got such a high success rate because you loved each other at one time. And it's undoing the woundedness, the pain that we've inflicted on each other and learning how to do this in a more healthy way.
Rebecca Lyons: Well, the reason we continue the dysfunctional dance is there's a secondary gain. We get to avoid the pain. We just get triggered, we repeat, but you're right, if we actually go, we're scared of something that's like you felt. Like this feels off-limits, this feels like this could be a black hole, we might really lose each other because it's just too painful to go back to. But with God's help, he exposes and resurfaces and heals. And that's the only way to move forward.
Gabe Lyons: And Rebecca and I do retreats. We just came off last week, six couples, it was four days going deep with them in the midst of their pain. And the thing that happened by the end, by the last 30% of this, you start to see couples realize wait, you're not my enemy. And I also am not going to try to make you in my image. Like God's given us two distinct personalities, that doesn't mean one's right or wrong, we're just different. And the more we can learn to respect the differences and see how God's created a gift in our marriage, then there's hope again. And they start to dream again and they go back to those dating years and those falling in love years and they start to reimagine. God does have a vision here and I need to just forgive and move forward with his help to support.
Rebecca Lyons: And you're watching the heart soften, you're watching the tears begin to flow, you're watching unity in prayer just transform within three to four days. It's so amazing. It's so beautiful.
Jim Daly: Gabe, in the book you talked about dropping I think your son off at camp and you're in the middle of this emotional review. How did that connect to your marriage with Rebecca? What was the Lord showing you?
Gabe Lyons: Well, my counselor had said look, you're having a hard time having tears because I hadn't cried in a decade. And he said I want you to pay attention the next time you do have tears. It was a few months later, I'm dropping my son at camp, he's 12 years old, driving away. I am crying for like an hour. I can't stop crying. Well, the signal for me was to go back and go why is this so traumatic for me? What am I feeling? And it took me back to a really hard time in my story when I was 12. And I hadn't put any of this together till I started to process, but in my origin story, it was at a camp type environment where I had a youth pastor that really created a trauma moment for me. But I realized from that moment on, that's where I started to turn my heart off because I had trusted this youth pastor, this was a mentor to me, it was somebody that I had shared more with than I had ever shared probably with my parents. All of a sudden, I get harmed in that. And so when Rebecca and I were finally able to start processing that, I realized I'm in tears right now because I'm scared for my own son. I'm dropping him off at a camp. It's an environment, it's where this trauma happened to me. And it was the tears though that led me down the journey to better understand and give weight to the story I'd lived through and the story that I'd really tried to suppress, not talk about, make it go away, keep moving forward, and yet it was what was really locking me up in my inability to connect at the heart level with Rebecca.
John Fuller: What an impactful story from Gabe Lyons. And it's pretty inspiring when a couple is willing to push on through to work through the hard things together and to really give all of those to the Lord. And Jim, I'm glad we got to hear the first part of the conversation. I'm looking forward to the next part.
Jim Daly: Well, I'm grateful for Gabe's vulnerability. You know, it's hard for guys to be that vulnerable. It's not an excuse, it just is true. And to hear him search his own heart to find the depth that was required there. Of course, Rebecca, his wife, is pulling that out. Come on, Gabe, connect with me. Boy, do I know that feeling with Jean and I. Same thing. He was describing something that many of us experience, which is how the past tends to show up in the present. And for those of you who are tipping into this, I hope the conversation has helped you understand the conflict in your marriage. And I want to encourage you to listen to the next episode to hear Gabe and Rebecca talk more about developing community and honoring one another. We have so many resources here at Focus on the Family to support you in your relationship. Man, 50 years of building help for you in marriage and parenting. If you're hurting because you are dealing with a crisis in your marriage, I want to encourage you to check our Hope Restored marriage intensives. It has an 80% success rate for those couples who participate. Don't hesitate to sign up to find healing together. Don't put it off. It's something you should work on today if you are limping. John will have more details on how to find that information in a minute. Another resource for learning how to develop a more connected marriage is Gabe and Rebecca's book *The Fight for Us*. And when you make a monthly pledge of any amount to the ministry of Focus on the Family, we'll send it to you as our way of saying thank you for helping others. Everything Focus on the Family offers, including Hope Restored, continues because monthly partners help make it possible. Month after month, a marriage restored doesn't just change one home. It raises children who know what God's love looks like, and that is a great goal. One Hope Restored participant said this: because of Hope Restored, we see a positive future for our marriage and relationships with our children. We can't thank Focus on the Family enough for providing this and keeping God at the center. So if you're able, become a monthly partner with us to make a generational impact on families for Christ. Probably one of the best investments we could all make today for our culture. Make a one-time gift as well, a gift of any amount and we'll send you the book as our way of saying thank you.
John Fuller: Donate today and get your copy of the book by Gabe and Rebecca Lyons when you call 800-A-FAMILY. Or learn more about Hope Restored and find the book details at FocusOnTheFamily.com/broadcast. And thanks for listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back for more of the conversation with Gabe and Rebecca Lyons as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ.