Identifying Triggers in Your Marriage (Part 1 of 2)

Tony really struggled in his marriage.

He and his wife seemed incompatible and headed toward divorce. Focus on the family many, many times is just very encouraging. Very encouraging for us to stick together, to pull through, to work it out, to go the distance.

I'm Jim Daly. This season, help us give families hope. And when you give today, your donation will be doubled.

Donate at FocusOnTheFamily.com slash joy. So I had to do a cleaning house of my idols and my thinking and it had to start with me. That the Lord had to work in me to work on how I was going to love Guy because regardless of whatever Guy did or didn't do, even if he was sinning, it did not mean that I had to sin. And so I had to start being humble and saying, OK, Lord, trying to fix him isn't working.

You've got to start fixing me. That's Amber Leah. And this is a best of 2021 Focus on the Family presentation, all about marriage. And Amber and her husband Guy will be sharing how to de-escalate and have a more peaceful relationship with your spouse.

Your host is Focus President and author Jim Daly. And I'm John Fuller. John, it's pretty normal for marriages to experience the ebb and flow of relationship. You have those beautiful days, those wonderful moments, and then you have the maybe not so wonderful moments like, do I have to tell you again where the milk is? I'm so sorry.

Or worse, the irritating things, right? Here's some encouragement from the Book of Hebrews. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. Maybe not you or your spouse, but Jesus is.

And that's something to stand on. No matter what things look like with your spouse today, rest in the fact that we have an unchanging God who is willing to comfort you and help you and transform your marriage. Today, we're going to bravely trudge into some areas that might be a little uncomfortable, the triggers in your marriage. Every marriage has them, and all of us need God's help to get through those things and kind of mature so those triggers don't trigger us, right? And I've asked Gene, my wonderful wife and accountability partner, to be here with us today. I think it's wonderful that we have Gene along with us. And Guy and Amber Leah are relationship coaches and co-owners of a faith and family production company in Los Angeles. They've been married 14 years and have four boys, and they've written a book together called Marriage Triggers, Exchanging Spouses' Angry Reactions for Gentle Biblical Responses. And we have that here at the ministry.

Give us a call, 800-A-FAMILY, or stop by FocusOnTheFamily.com slash broadcast to get your copy. Welcome, each and every one of you. Thank you.

We are so glad to be here. Now, I'm really looking forward to this. I think it's one of the core communication issues in marriage. How do we not trigger each other? How do we better understand those triggers? And we're going to get into that. Guy and Amber, you came up with the idea, so let's start with you. You describe your marriage as triggered from the start. That sounds a little frightening. Why was that the case, and didn't you enjoy a little bit of a honeymoon period?

Well... Who wants to put their hand up? Emphasis on the word little. We had a little bit of a honeymoon period, but not very long. Things moved very, very quickly for us. When we got married, and within a couple of months, we got pregnant. And so we didn't have that time to kind of develop ourselves and get to know our identity as a young married couple. We quickly shifted directly into parenting, and the extra room that was going to be the fun room suddenly turned into the baby's room. My wife is a wonderful planner, and so she shifted into high gear planning mode and painting and all the things. I'm like, wait a minute.

What about me? He was saying. Is evidence of your growth the fact that you just said, she's a wonderful planner?

It sounded so heartfelt. It used to be like, man, she plans everything. It still is. I'll admit that can still be a thing.

Best put forward. Those are one of the differences we have in our relationship is she very much is the planner, and she thinks 10 steps ahead. And I'm very happy thinking one or two steps ahead and being in the moment. And so we have to continually find that balance for ourselves. So I get the baby part, but before that even, there were other stressors going on for the newlyweds listening that may be going, oh, my goodness, that's my wife or that's my husband.

What were some of those other stressors? Well, you know, they say opposites attract and there is some truth to that, but it also creates a lot of everyday practical problems. And when you're in a friendship and dating and then you get married, living with one another is a different beast. And, you know, it was even early on just with, for example, we would I wanted to put in our new apartment a wall of portraits. You know, our wedding photo and, you know, make room for when baby comes and all that. And the planner in me, the big wall of pictures.

And I thought on a Saturday, this is going to be amazing. We will all lay it out. We'll do all the measuring. Guy will do all the hammering.

And he will run. He will get ready to watch the football game, you know, and he was like, whoa. Excellent choice. It was the Notre Dame USC football game. And that's what I had planned for that day.

That's right. How could you plan that during the SC Notre Dame game? We just had different perspectives on what was important at the time. And because we didn't at the time have the communication skills to work through those things together, which we want to offer people hope that that is possible. At the time, we weren't doing that. We were just triggered and easily provoked to anger. And so we were reacting instead of responding to each other.

And and it kind of went downhill from there. Did either of those things happen then? Did the wall get the pictures or did the game get watched? The wall got done and the game got watched part of it. So neither of us were very happy about either place at the end. It ended up in the book.

So it's still it still exists as one of those days. It was a pivotal day for us. Well, and you both became convinced that you'd married the wrong person.

That's a big statement. Yeah, I married Mr. Wrong for sure. And he married Ms. All wrong. I mean, we just we got it all wrong. And I used to think, well, I believe in God's sovereignty, but boy, this was a mistake. I mean, I really felt that way early on, even though I loved him. And a lot of the time I liked him. We had so many triggers that I wondered, how is this going to happen? How are we going to navigate this for the rest of our lives? And it wasn't until God started working on me personally, after I nagged and argued and yelled for a really long time.

And that didn't work. The Lord eventually started to say, Amber, you are Ms. All wrong and he's Mr. Wrong. But that's because nobody is perfect.

There is no perfect person except for Jesus Christ. And so as long as you continue to be prideful and argue, you are not going to live life to the full or have the marriage that I designed. Because the minute that you say I do, you do become a match made in heaven.

And so that's what I had to come to was like, you know what? We made a vow. God did bring us together. He is wrong.

I'm wrong. But that's because we're two people that are sinful. We need to yield to being perfected in Christ day by day.

And that's what's going to make us right for each other. You know, Amber, as you describe that, one of the things that certainly Jean and I have encountered, I think you and Dina, John, have probably encountered this, too. It's hard to, if I could say it this way, get your fingers out of your ears. Because I think we get into the habit in our marital relationships where the more pain you're causing me, the more trigger you're causing me, the harder I stuff my fingers into my ears because I don't want to hear it. And it is the exact opposite of what the Lord wants from you. Right? Yeah. The pain acts as blinders.

You know, it filters us to not being able to hear or see each other. And that is a fork in the road in your relationship. You've got to decide if that's where you want to live in that constant conflict. Amber came up with this wonderful principle that I think is one of the pivotal things in our book, and in our marriage, is the development of a me-first attitude. And at first thought, that sounds like prideful, me-first, I want to get what I want. It's actually the flip of that. It's the, if I want my wife to be more loving, then I need to start with me and I need to be more loving.

If I want her to be more understanding and compassionate about my needs, I need to show her that compassion and the understanding of her needs first, be first, and it changes everything. Well, that's a good foundation. I mean, obviously. Let's go to some of the triggers in the book because I want to hit those. And you're going to come back next time because we're going to keep this discussion going. And Jean wants to tell the world about all of my stuff.

It would be a separate web extra. She's got quite a list over there. It's going to the floor there. But one of the things, Amber, you identified with, and Jean said, yeah, that's one for me too, is when the house is a mess, that's a trigger.

How is that a trigger? I mean, are Guy and I triggering this in you and Jean? You know, it's a combination of things and it, you know, every marriage is unique, right?

Because you've got two unique personalities and that's going to make up a unique marriage personality. But for a lot of couples, we found that one or the other is more bothered by clutter or dirtiness, you know, which are two different things. Sometimes the house is very clean.

Wives will tell their husbands when they, you know, are come in after being gone from work or whatever. And we'll say the house is clean. It's just cluttered. It's messy. But those are two different things.

I'm trying really hard here. But so for Guy and I, you know, he's not as bothered or triggered by clutter as I am. And when you're home a lot, like I was with our kids when they were young, a lot of couples will tell us this is such a problem. And so I had to disrupt that habit of being reacting, being quick to anger. And, you know, I believed God when he said be slow to anger, you know, be quick to listen.

And I had to say, OK, deep breath. What can we do together to tackle this? You know, put some things in place, communicate. Part of it was just me practically having to get some better storage bins for the mess, teaching the kids to take on a little bit more responsibility. But if that's your biggest trigger, you don't get overwhelmed by the 10 triggers that you have, but take one at a time. And we would do that. We're like, look, the constant clutter is not working for me.

What can we do to strategize together? I don't want to keep reacting. I want to be more proactive. If I can say from my side of things, you know, I was working a really intense job where I'd be at work 10, 12 hours a day and I'd come home. And Amber's got, you know, two or three or four kids at home.

At this time, it was three kids, two of them still in diapers. And I'd come home and could barely open the door because there's like toys all over the floor, you know. And I'm walking into that going like, I just got off work and I should come into a house that's clean and ready and, you know, and I'd be frustrated or I wouldn't say anything.

Yeah, that was not a good stage. I would allow that trigger to kind of bubble up in me and it would immediately push me towards frustration and anger right away. But until I gained a full understanding of what her day was like with those kids in the house by herself, without a lot of friends at all, in this new neighborhood that we had moved into. Until I had a better understanding of what her days were like, I was triggered very quickly. So once we had a better understanding of that, it allowed me to be more understanding of walking into that. I went through a job loss and while that wasn't a good thing in the end, God used it for good because he was home more and he got to see how difficult it was.

And that made things better for us. Let me ask Guy for those spouses who can't walk in those shoes then, who do have that stressful job and are stressed out. Well, I can ask Jim as well.

I'd say ask Guy. Stressed out by the clutter and the chaos. What advice do you have for them? I want to say that it's a really simple one, but I just think that you have to have an understanding of what your spouse, what their day is like and what they're going through. And again, it goes back to that me first attitude a little bit.

When you are concentrating on yourself, thinking about what your attitude is, going into something, I think you can get a better understanding of what you're walking into with your spouse. And you would do that also. He would call me on the way home from work. He got in the habit of doing that just to kind of get a lay of the land, a feel for the environment he was walking into so he could prepare himself mentally to walk into that.

That was one thing we did. I'd take a moment either in traffic or right out in front of the house while in the car just, how's it going? What am I walking into?

What do you need help with? That's a good question. When I would call home if Dina said, what do you want? I knew that I was walking into something. Exactly. Sounds more like military communication. We got four zombies at the right there.

Look out when you come in the door. That's right. Yes. Yes.

Prepare yourself for the land mines. Okay. Well, that was very good of the ladies on this house being clean thing. Now, let's go to a guy one. Guy.

When it comes to us being triggered, maybe backseat driving? Oh. I mean, I'm terrible at that. Yeah.

Right, Jean? I'll confess it. Me too. I can be a backseat driver. Absolutely.

She didn't hesitate much there. No. No. But we've worked through that. Good.

I'm glad. That one's off the, okay, let's move on to the next trigger. Yeah. You need to talk about it. Guy, there was early in your marriage, you had a driving experience, I think, with the two of you.

What happened and we'll respond. Yeah. We were, you know, we, so we live in Los Angeles and it is just crazy.

It is fill every hole. It's traffic for hours. It's just nuts. And on this particular evening, we were driving back and it rained a little bit. And we were, I was changing lanes and someone in front of me just changed right in front of me and caused me to have to, you know, jerk the wheel to get out of the way. And Amber immediately was like, Guy, what are you doing?

You shouldn't drive like that. And it was this immediate lash out at me. And I'm like, it wasn't me.

It was him. And I'm trying to be defensive and take care of this. Yeah. Let me ask you this question.

If you didn't swerve, would you have been hit? Oh, absolutely. I'm on your side on this one, Guy. I am now. I wasn't then, but I am now.

The principle is, and we didn't necessarily work it out that night as successfully. And Guy's being nice because the truth is, this was a habit of mine. I mean, I was, it wasn't just when we were in danger. I was always telling him how to drive.

I admit that. But what I was able to do is to think the best about my wife and realize that she wasn't lashing out at me in my bad driving. She was actually lashing out at her sense of safety for our four kids that were in the backseat most of the time.

So she being the mama bear, her concern was safety for them. And so that's where her frustration was coming from. So I just had to realize that it wasn't towards me.

It was literally about the situation and allowed me to accept her prompts and anxiety and all that in a much different way. And it really changed. It still crops up from time to time.

It's an organic thing. Marriage, you know, every day is different. So it still comes up every once in a while. But it required a conversation. I mean, one of the things that Guy and I did is, I mean, it was so constant that we were getting frustrated in the car. We were like, look, we're going to have to drive together a lot for the next however many years.

We've got to figure this out. So I was like, okay, I'm going to focus on you. You're the driver. You focus on driving. I'm the passenger. I will work on being a passenger and not a driver. And I will try to allow my anxieties to take a backseat, you know?

Yeah. But the question is, how did you control your tongue? That's what all of this is about. I'd bite my tongue literally. I'm not kidding.

I would just like bite my tongue, you know, like, okay, Amber, zip it. But we started listening to podcasts or books on tape just to distract me. Were these instructional driving? Yes. Focus on the family. See, we should have come here back then.

That's a good idea. Just picture the blue skies. Water trickling. But honestly, like, it seems like a small thing, you know, being a backseat driver. I get it. But it really, the perpetual, you know, interjections of while someone's driving, it gets to you. It just creates a layer of frustration that you may not even pick up on overtly. So now when Guy is driving, I'm in charge of the map and not in a, hey, Turkey, you were supposed to turn there, which I still do. That's a great move, actually. You know, and letting him take the scenic route. You know, if he doesn't go the way I would go, it's okay. Let it go.

That's good. And for those just joining us, the triggers idea is that I'm having a reaction, but it's kind of the tip of the iceberg, right? There's something else going on, perhaps that's kind of coming forth. Is that fear? A fear, for sure.

Fear, anxiety, a sense of lack of control, even positive change can cause some measure of stress in a relationship where you're more easily set off by things that your spouse is doing. Well, the book is split up into internal triggers and external triggers for a reason. All those things are encompassed in both of those.

Right. And Amber, I can relate to this next trigger. Actually, I can relate to all the triggers, frankly not. Oh, we're signing off. Thank you for joining Focus on the Family. But in your book, you've mentioned that you've had a struggle with an intimacy idol in your relationship because you didn't feel loved.

Tell us about that. Yes, I had very many preconceived notions and expectations about what our marriage was supposed to look like. And for us, I thought it was going to be a lot of security financially, white picket fence.

Guy will go to work. I wanted to be a stay at home mom and work from home on occasion. And the Lord, all his plans for us are good and they work together for good. But in those early years, I didn't think much of the plans that Guy was making for our family were good. And so I had this idol of closeness and intimacy that he was going to do things my way. We were going to be on the same page. And when that didn't happen, it caused me to become really bitter.

And so no matter what Guy would say or do, he couldn't get it right. Right. And that is a really dangerous place to be. And it's a painful place to be. And it sets up conflict, obviously. Jean, I just for people to understand your connection with this.

What were you feeling? And I think it's rooted in expectations. That's what you started with.

Absolutely. That we have unrealistic expectations. And I would say, you know, the maybe the greatest thing that I've learned through marriage is that your spouse cannot read your mind. And I can remember being hurt that Jim couldn't read my mind. He didn't know everything that I expected. And if I had to tell him what I was expecting, that that made me angry. And until I recognize that is so unfair. Only Jesus, only God can read our minds.

And I am not God. I know that every day. And you should sit down with your spouse and during the season and say, OK, this is really what my expectations are for my birthday or for when you come home for work. Or these are my expectations for when I come home for work. And how can we get the birthday one's funny. You should bring that up because there was one birthday where Jean said to me, I just you know, I'm not sure you can tell us all the motivation behind this, but said, you know, I really don't want anything for my birthday. I'm good this year.

Basically, very, very crisp, bright attitude. I thought, oh, wow, take some pressure. So birthday comes and, you know, we have dinner. And the next day I could tell she's not happy.

And I'm like, what's the matter? You didn't even get me a card for my birthday. Yeah, well, I thought you said what I heard was you didn't want that. You said, I mean, anything is like a gift. It's a card.

It's anything. Right. But that wasn't quite. No, and I still remember where we were when I said it. And what I said was what I meant was I didn't want Jim to buy me a gift. I didn't want Jim and the boys. But that didn't mean I didn't want homemade cards from the boys that I wanted. I wanted, you know, dinner. She wasn't fully letting you off the hook. What she didn't realize is she was actually giving the boys and I a gift. A day off of birthdays. We thought, wow, that is so kind of mom. But I will say, I mean, truly after that, I was able to say to Jim, okay, these are my expectations for my birthday. You work it out.

Can you work with the boys to make a handwritten cards? Now, you guys had this with Christmas, right? Your first or second Christmas, you had a stocking battle. Right.

I mean, we were so excited. We were going to do stockings. You say it, Guy.

Yeah. You did it. I was so excited when she said she wanted to do stockings. I was really excited that that was going to be a tradition in our family, because that was something that was a tradition that my family had. The night before Christmas, we would always get together and open the stockings. And it was so much fun. But our stockings would be filled with gag gifts and little funny things and just crazy stuff.

And we'd do even a white elephant thing where you'd end up sending the bad gift around. And it was so much fun. Amber's stocking, for me, was filled with cologne and movie tickets and all this wonderful oils and different fun things. I pulled out a red feather boa, and I was pretty sure that pulling that red feather boa out of my Christmas stocking that we weren't going to make it to Christmas number two.

The beginning of the end. Because I had been so thoughtful, all these favorite things in his stocking, valuable gifts, and I had just gag gift after gag gift, and I just thought, wow, we are really living in two different planets here. You know, Amber and Guy and Jean, at the end here, I think it's important to really hone in on that idea of coveting the ideal marriage, having that high, high impossible expectation, I guess, Amber, that you describe in your book.

I want to, again, address that. Why is that really one of the most damaging things to a marriage? When you have an idol in your thinking and you don't even realize it because your spouse is not living up to your expectations or your marriage or your circumstances, the life that you've created is not the life that you hoped for and prayed for, you have a choice to make at some point in that moment. You can continue to be triggered and angry and bitter, and you can go down a path toward destruction because Satan is alive and well, and he is seeking whom he may devour.

And we're convinced that he was trying to devour us in those early years of our marriage, and even now, he still is on the attack. But the other option was to recognize that my desire for what I want is either going to become so obsessive that I sin if I don't have it, and that is an idol in my life because I covet that more than putting on humility, a compassionate heart, kindness, and forgiveness, and being open to trusting God with my marriage and my husband and my life. And so I had to tear down all those idols of what I wanted, and I had to start approaching Guy differently, and he had to start approaching me differently. And ultimately, we had to say, our lives are not our own.

If I am so fixated on Guy's ability to make me happy or not, or my circumstances to be ideal, then I will always be miserable because in this world I will have trouble, but Jesus says, Fear not, for I have overcome the world. So I had to do a cleaning house of my idols and my thinking, and it had to start with me, that the Lord had to work in me to work on how I was going to love Guy because regardless of whatever Guy did or didn't do, even if he was sinning, it did not mean that I had to sin. And so I had to start being humble and saying, OK, Lord, trying to fix him isn't working.

You've got to start fixing me. I also appreciate the transparency from Amber and Guy Leah on today's Best of 2021 Focus on the Family. Some convicting reminders there. And Jim, it really was very nice to have Jean in on the conversation as well. Well, I do every time Jean's here. I'm glad she's there with us.

I really appreciated Amber and what she was talking about. Fixing those little problems in your marriage isn't just about praying for your spouse to change. It's about working on your own heart first. And if you can get there, your marriage is going to be in a good place over the long haul. And we're here to be kind of a drip irrigation system for you and your marriage to help you remember that. We want to help you have a strong, thriving marriage. And we know challenges arise.

We get that. We also know that sometimes professional help is needed to rescue a marriage. That's one reason we have our Hope Restored marriage intensives.

And they work. In the post two year survey that we do with these couples, 81 percent are doing better and still married. We couldn't do this type of ministry without you. When you support Focus on the Family through prayer and financial gifts, you come alongside those couples and so much more here at Focus. You give families hope. And when you donate today, a gift of any amount, we'll send you a copy of Guy and Amber Leah's book, Marriage Triggers, Exchanging Spouses, Angry Reactions for Gentle Biblical Responses. And that'll be our way of saying thank you for standing with us to save these marriages.

And because of a special year-end matching opportunity going on right now, your gift will be doubled dollar for dollar. God will use your donation to help bring healing and redemption to twice as many families. And we're excited to see what God's going to do through you and Focus on the Family in 2022. Donate and get your copy of Marriage Triggers when you call 800 the letter A in the word family, or check the episode notes for the link. On behalf of Jim Daly and the entire team, thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family.

I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we continue this best of 2021 conversation with Guy and Amber Leah and Jean Daly as well. And once more, help you and your family thrive in Christ. I was shocked when she gave me the divorce papers. I was so done.

I had reached my breaking point. I was desperate for a shred of hope, so I called the Hope Restored team at Focus on the Family. They listened to me and they asked about what was happening in my marriage. They encouraged me and my wife to attend one of their marriage intensives for couples in crisis and they prayed with us. They helped me believe that my marriage could be saved. I agreed to go but was very skeptical that anything could help us.

But the whole environment was so safe and non-judgmental. I felt my heart start to open up as we worked with the counselors. Both of us still have work to do in our marriage, but for the first time in a long time, we have hope again. Focus on the Family's Hope Restored Marriage Intensive Program has helped thousands of couples who thought that their marriage was over. Find out which program is right for you at HopeRestored.com