The Mindful Marriage | Ron Deal

The wheels on their marriage bus nearly came off.

How did they manage to survive? Today, practical help for couples who are struggling. Ron Deal will talk about the mindful marriage and how neuroscience and the Bible can help you stop the painful patterns in a troubled relationship. You know Ron, from his writing about the blended family and answering questions about step-parenting, I think this new resource is going to be a great help to any couple who wants to build a stronger connection.

You can find our featured resource at the website buildingrelationships.us. And Gary, it strikes me this two-prong approach of understanding yourself and how you respond to your spouse goes right along with the love language concept. Well, I think it does. I think there are parallels there, certainly. This book, however, is a really great in-depth study. I think any couple working through this book, it'd be like sitting down with a counselor and working through some stuff.

So I'm excited about our discussion today. Well, let's welcome back the director of Family Life Blended and president of Smart Step Families, Ron Deal. He's the most widely read and viewed author on blended families in the country. He and his wife Nan were married in 1986, and they've written this new book together, The Mindful Marriage. Create your best relationship through understanding and managing yourself.

You can find out more at buildingrelationships.us. Well, Ron, welcome back to Building Relationships. It's good to be with you again, Gary. You're a good friend and always enjoy talking with you.

Well, I feel the same way. I enjoyed writing a book with you earlier. We can mention that later, perhaps, but this book I'm really, really excited about. Well, Ron, I think there are many of our listeners who have never heard the story of your and Nan's struggle in your marriage, in which you really got to the place where you felt like things were falling apart. I've told my story many times, of course, with Carolyn, but tell us about that and the road that you've been on since then. You know, through the years, we have told many people privately that story.

And on occasion, when it made sense, it's entered into my public teaching. But we just really felt like it was time to go all out. Not that we were hiding it all along, but that we just didn't really know how to verbalize the story. And candidly, we were still working on us in a way that we wanted to get further in our journey before we could really share it. And so four years ago, we went to our therapist, Dr. Terry Hargrave, who in this book, we tell everybody how he has been developing a strategy and approach to working with couples for many years.

And it's used around the world at this point, but mostly the academic community is the only people who know about it. And we went to him and said, you know, you changed our life. And we're absolutely in love with everything that you've done. We've been teaching it and counseling and using it for years and years at this point. And we just want to share it with the world. Can we partner with you and your wife, Sharon, and can the four of us write this book and make it accessible for the average person? And that's what the mindful marriage has become. It is our testimony, Nan and I's testimony of our mess and how the Hargraves changed all that with their principles that they are now teaching and have been has been taught academically for years. And we're just trying to make it accessible to everybody because we know how powerful it really is. Yeah. Well, you know, I think when we share our own journey, it does help people because they realize, oh, they're not perfect. Oh, they've been there. That's exactly right, Gary. And people are attracted to that.

Absolutely. And I'm encouraged that you've chosen to do that. You know, it turns out that your counselor, Dr. Terry Hargrave, has innovated a model of therapy that you've talked about that is beginning to gain recognition. Tell us about restoration therapy, which is the term that's used. And how does it relate to this book, Mindful Marriages?

Well, first of all, let me just say it is deeply Christian. Restoration therapy has its roots in the New Testament language of old self and new self. We've all heard a good sermon about how we should take off our old self and put on our new.

That's the language Paul uses over and over and over again. And if you're like me, you go, yeah, that's right. I need to go do that. And then you go home and you have another bad moment where you just do the same thing again.

And you're like, how do I take it off and put it on? And that's the core of what restoration therapy really does. But it also integrates the best of what we know from neuroscience and how the brain body works. Over the last 20 years, we've learned so much.

That's integrated. What we know about what we call attachment, that is the emotional, psychological connection that we all have in important relationships, how that gets flushed out in a marriage context specifically. So neuroscience attachment, self-regulation, big term, we can unpack that a little bit. But the biblical word for that is self-control.

That's not a new idea, but it turns out learning how to do it just takes a huge discipline. And then there's this issue of pride and humility and how pride works against our relationships and humility works for it. All of those concepts are rolled up into this what's called restoration therapy, the mindful marriage. At the end of the day, mindfulness is a word a lot of people kind of go, well, what's that? That sounds a little new aging.

No, no, no, no, it's not. The Bible's replete with using the term in the form of what Romans 12, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. That's what we're helping people to actually do, not just know what they should do, but actually take off that old self and put on the new and start doing it.

That's what this approach is really, really great at. In the book, you use the term us-ness. What is that and how does emotional dysregulation affect it? Well, yeah, your us-ness is that thing that you created on the day you got married. It's a living, breathing organism that exists as a result of marital commitment, love, and trustworthiness to one another.

It's what you are together that is far more than the sum of the two people. I've often thought we do the unity candle, maybe a little bit backwards. He takes his candle, she takes hers, and they light the center candle. Traditionally, you blow yourself out at that point. It's like, whoa, wait a minute, where did you go? You don't actually die. You don't stop becoming a person or being a person.

As a matter of fact, you should keep those individual candles lit and then step back from the unity candle and go, okay, there's you, there's me, and there's our us-ness. That's the thing in the middle that we have created, that we are committed to, to use the biblical language that we're going to feed and nurture and care for. It's like a child, Gary.

It's the child that results because of your love and dedication to one another, but you do got to feed that child. You better take care of it. You better teach it. You better instruct it. You better pour into it.

Then that helps that child grow up. Your us-ness is exactly the same. When your us-ness is at peace, each partner is being fed by it and each partner thrives within it. You feel safe. You feel whole. You naturally give, and here's the thing, you naturally give the best of yourself back to the us-ness.

You get fed and you turn around and feed it, but when your us-ness is in pain, here's what we know. That one or both partners is sort of neurologically dysregulated, and we can flesh that out. I mean, and essentially it means you feel insecure. You're feeling anxious about your worth, about how much they want you or how much you want them, and do you feel safe to give of yourself in this relationship.

That's what the dysregulation is about the us-ness. It feels like our flame is about to blow out. It feels like the flame is getting smaller, and I'm not feeling great about that. Any moment, and here's what's crazy about dysregulation, it comes in a heartbeat. All of us listening right now who have ever been in any sort of close intimate relationship, especially a marriage, you've had those days where everything is clicking, and you are just loving one another, and then one of you makes a remark, and in a nanosecond, you are against each other.

It's like, what just happened in that moment? We loved each other. I made a comment.

You heard something. Maybe I meant it harsh, but you heard harsh, and now you got your heels dug in, and I'm a defensive. Where did our us-ness go in that moment? We can all relate to this. There's something happening in those moments that brings out the worst of us. When we're at peace, it brings the best of us. When we're at pain or in pain, it brings out the worst of us.

We all know it. We've all been there. We all feel it, and it doesn't mean our relationship is horrible. It just means that moment, something's off. Yeah.

There is a beauty in that, and there is a challenge and an art to learning how to feed and care and nurture that us-ness in a way that keeps it at peace. Yeah. And it's a journey, right? Yes. Oh my goodness.

Oh my goodness. And here's the thing I've learned about dysregulation. Everybody on the planet gets dysregulated. Everybody feels a little anxious and insecure and nervous.

Another word is triggered, discombobulated, where you just don't feel like things are going well in your relationship, even if it's just for a few moments, or sometimes it's a season. For us, it rose to the point where Nan's like, I'm done. Whatever we've got, I don't want it anymore. I mean, that was our crisis moment in 2007 that led us into Dr. Hargrave's office.

And we tell that whole story in the book. That was a huge dysregulated moment for us. We all do this. We all know what it feels like. And the question is, when that happens, I become my worst self. How do I stay in my Christ-mature new self in those moments? That's what we are getting at.

And so it really is core to how we do marriage. Can I jump in and ask you how bad it got? I know Nan said, I don't want, but was it, you know, from your perspective, what were those days like? And, you know, the darkness that you were in?

Well, it was deeply frightening. At the end of the day, I can tell you now that she didn't really want a divorce. She didn't really want to leave. She was just so sick and tired of what we had that she didn't know how to live with it.

And by the way, I really think that's a common experience. What I've learned is, well, we talk about in the book the two pillars that every relationship needs to have. It's got to have love. Love gives you a sense of identity, a sense of your worth and belonging and value in the relationship. But you also have to have trust. And trust gives you safety.

It gives you a sense that I'm safe within your arms, within this relationship. Most people, long before they get a divorce, they fall out of safety with one another and then fall out of love with one another. I would say in 2007, Nan had fallen out of safety with me. She didn't believe that I was there for her, that she could count on me, that our relationship was being fed and nurtured. We were trying and we had plenty of wonderful moments, but we had more and more and more dysregulated moments. And that just grew to a place where she was like, I don't know how to live with this.

So she didn't really want to end our marriage, but she didn't know how to live with it either. And so it was that moment of, and of course that hit me between the eyes, like, oh, wow, I knew we were struggling. Didn't realize it was that bad on your side.

I don't think it's that bad. You know, which one of us is right now? We're arguing about how bad we are. You know, that's a fun little place to be. And so it was like, clearly, something's got to change. Clearly, we need some outside help. And that's where we saw it. I will say this. I didn't think we were that bad off. Now, you can go, was that dinner aisle?

Was that? And I've learned that I'm really good at counter blame. So in my mind, it's not nearly as bad as it is in her mind. And so I can make her the problem with that.

And that's what I did initially. And it was only when I ended up in Terry's office that I began a journey that he, unfortunately and fortunately, forced me into, where I had to look deeply into the mirror at my own pride and discover that, man, I'm blind to me. And if I don't wake up, what Nan and I have is just going to keep getting worse.

And Nan had a whole side on, you know, she would tell you she had a whole lot that she had to work on too. This is not a one person problem. This was a two person problem. But I was not willing to look at myself until that moment.

Yeah. Because by nature, all of us, when a situation like that, we're really thinking, it's the other problem. It's the other person.

If they would, if they would change. But you're right, it has to be, it has to be both of us because we're, the us-ness is there. Exactly. And we're both responsible for our us-ness and to it.

Yeah. Now, you talk a lot about neurology of interpersonal relationships. Explain that and why is it important? Well, you know, I think there's the experience of, you know, having bad moments and just becoming upset or angry at your partner or critical of them or feeling their criticism and you get defensive. Like, those are the words that we all put on it. But in the last 25 years, we've learned what's going on below the surface. That is, what's embodied in our mind, body, and brain.

And it kind of goes like this. As we experience moments in our childhood and adulthood where we don't quite feel loved or don't quite feel safe, those two pillars we talked about, when one or both of those is off, either from how we were parented moments at home or an early relationship or maybe even a first marriage, that our brain writes a little story about what that means for us. Oh, what this means is, the way, this is Ron's story that I've learned about myself.

What this means is, the way Ron shows his adequacy is by excelling in his work, by performing really well, by doing his best. And so I was driven and I drove so hard at my work and career and life and marriage and trying to be a good husband and father all at the same time. But at the end of the day, the husband part really suffered.

And that's what Nan was really reacting to in a big way at that season of our life. And well, what's that about for me? Well, for me, it's about, I don't want to feel inadequate.

I don't want to feel like I'm not enough. Well, what's that about? Well, that pain came from the question that I had in my childhood about how I get my dad's love. And he had high expectations and he was an evangelist and a wonderful man. I had great parents. And at the same time, I also knew if I didn't live up to the standards that I might just lose their affection, their love. At least I sort of, that's the story I wrote for myself. I don't think that was actually true on any level, but I made it true. And so the story of my pain is if I'm inadequate, that I may not be loved and may not be safe.

So you just perform really well. All right, fast forward a little bit. That's the story my brain knows. So any time, any time in my marriage that I felt like I saw Nan's disappointment about me, I panicked.

I went right into, oh, I'm not enough and she's not going to be satisfied with me. So I better get busy. And I would get busy in two ways. By the way, this is a fight or flight reactivity. This is neurological. We all do fight or flight. Fight or flight takes four forms, blame, shame, control, or escape.

Those are the four ways it comes out of us. I'm a good blamer. I can counter blame.

I could figure out what Nan doesn't have right. And I can take her argument apart and go turn it around and make it about her. I'm also a control person.

So I can control by performing, by doing and exceeding. I can also control by criticizing her. At the end of the day, blame and control tactics just make things worse because she doesn't feel heard. She didn't feel understood. She just feels attacked. And oh, by the way, she has her own pain narrative from her childhood where nobody really listened to her ever.

She just felt abandoned and all alone most of her life as a kid. And so whenever I would go into the mode of defending myself and proving her wrong, she basically heard, yep, I still don't have anybody on my side. And so our two pain narratives collide in our blame, shame, control, and escape strategies. And it just makes things really ugly.

Now, what's crazy about this is you can map this. I mean, once you understand this and we take people in the mindful marriage through some exercises where you will map your pain cycle and you'll map their pain cycle and you'll see how these two things collide, it is amazing. And you put it on paper and you go, oh my goodness, when we are great, we are fabulous. We are not like anything what we've seen on this paper, but in our bad moments, this is exactly who we are. And you now know what your old self is.

And it's just as plain as day. Now you have the challenge of saying, how do I take that off and put on self-control and become what God has designed me to be? And we lead people through that process of discovering how you move toward peace. But the neurological component here is important because at the end of the day, here's what it is. Your brain wants to do what it knows to do. And you have to overcome that by renewing your mind.

Now, notice what I just said. Romans 12 does not say, be transformed by the renewing of your brain. It says to renew your mind. Your mind tells your brain and your body what it should do, not what it knows to do, not what it's got a neurological rut that it loves to run down this rut towards blame and control. But this time, Ron, we need to move towards compassion and kindness and softness and gentleness and take off the blame and control.

That's my mind telling my brain how to act. And that's when we get transformed. Like all of a sudden, that old neurological self is slowly being pushed away. My sinful nature is being pushed away. That's what is transformative. That's what is transformative. And we're just amazed at how far this has brought us, not just in our marriage, but at the end of the day, this is helping me walk with Christ.

Yeah. I think many of our listeners, and maybe most people, really don't think about the neurological aspect and what you call the pain narrative. We just know how we're responding, but we don't know, you know, the part that the brain is playing and all of that. So I think that alone is very, very helpful to people.

And I'll just add this, Gary, it is a fascinating endeavor. The point is, this is a part of me, and it is my job to manage me. Once I identify that neurological component, if you will, to my old self, then it's still my job in humility before God to start managing that. Most of us spend our entire life, as you said earlier, very insightfully, by the way, most of us spend our entire life trying to get our spouse to love us or do something different in such a way that the pain I feel goes away. Now notice, that is Matthew 7. That is me focusing on the little tiny speck in your eye while I've got this huge log in my eye that I'm totally ignoring.

And so I obsess over the speck in your eye. Well, that doesn't help either one of us deal with the log. I can't get Nan to love me in such a way that I feel adequate. She can't love that into me. It's not up to her.

It's up to me. And I really think this is so vital to the Christian walk and how we portray our lives with one another in marriage. I'm just telling you, I don't think we talk this talk very well.

We inadvertently sort of blame the victim. We say to the spouse, well, what can you do to help Ron not feel inadequate and insecure about himself? Well, she can be kind and nice and do certain things that help me, but that is neurological. It is in my brain. It's embodied in me. She can't love it out of me.

It's inappropriate for us to assume she can. What needs to happen is Ron needs to take responsibility for Ron. And that's when I can grow up in Christ. And so as this message pours out, it's sort of like, wow, okay, stop blaming the victim, Ron, start dealing with yourself. You know, I said at the beginning of the program that this reminds me of dovetails with the love language concept. It also dovetails with what I've heard Gary say through the years, and that is marriage is a lot of work. It takes work. And we often think, well, we love each other.

We're compatible. It ought to be, you know, bonbons and cotton candy all the time. And it's not. It does take work, doesn't it?

It does, Chris. And I'm so glad you brought this up because, you know, Gary and I wrote a book together, Building Love Together and Blended Families, where we apply some of the smart step family principles I have with Gary's love languages. In our book, this actually is a bonus section that we have some bonus material online that people can get for free. And we write about how people misuse your love language principles with what I'm talking about. How many times have you heard somebody say, well, my love language is, and you got to get my wife to love me that way.

No, the whole point in your principles is for me to be selfless and start looking at how I can serve my spouse rather than demand that they serve me. But I know you've had people misuse that for years and years and years. What is that? That is what I've been talking about.

We want the other to love me in such a way that I don't feel any pain in my heart and life anymore. That will never, ever work. I'm the one who has to deal with the log in my eye. And here's what Dr. Hargrave has taught me. There is a quick fix about, oh, if you'll just, you know, love me in a certain way, then my log will leave my life. Well, no, that's like cotton candy.

Your spouse can make you feel good for a few minutes. But what is neurological in your brain, embodied in your soul? You are going to hang on to until the day you reckon with it, until you start taking charge of it. It's not even up to God. And let me explain that. We all know better than we act.

Why is that? Because we understand God's will for our life, but that doesn't mean we actually do it. Discipleship is about me aligning my will with God's will. That's when I get transformed. That's when God's really in charge of my life. That's when I make Him king, is when I align my will with His. And that means I have to deal with what my body, brain, soul wants to do. So until I take charge of that, I'm just going to walk around with a log in my eye, blaming everybody else for all the stuff they do wrong that makes me what I am. And that is a losing game for any marriage.

Just go to buildingrelationships.us to find out more. We talked about the old self and the new self, the biblical concept, putting off the old self, and the role that the patterns in our brain, how they influence us. And unless we're really thinking about it, we don't see that. How does humility fit into this whole thing of understanding the other person, understanding yourself, and processing all those? So in The Mindful Marriage, we're going to walk people into an understanding of their pain cycle and the story of pain in their life and what it leads them to do, how they react in blame, shame, control, and escape. We're then going to lead them to a place where they understand the peace cycle. That is, what does it look like to live out of God's truth rather than out of your pain? And once they've identified that, they have a very tangible map of how to change their life, how to be transformed by the renewing of their mind.

And here's what we've learned. People won't do it unless they put on humility. At the end of the day, humility is the attitude that says, yeah, it's my job to deal with me. It is me and God working on me through the spirit power of the Holy Spirit. And unless I bow the knee to the King every single day and say, Lord, help me, I won't actually change what I do. I'll just stay stuck in it. I may have the greatest knowledge.

I got this map in front of me. I now know me better than I've ever known me, and I won't change anything in real life because I still think in pride that I don't deserve this, or I deserve better, or it's somebody else's fault, or whatever it is that pushes it away from me. Humility is that posture that says, I'm getting really serious about who I am, and I'm bringing that before God and asking for His help. It's what activates the change in us, and without it, we're just stuck. And let me just pull back for a second and say, there's an amazing principle taught in Scripture that I just continue to ponder and chew on, and we talk about it in the mindful marriage. And it's repeated, I've lost track, I think, more than 35 times throughout the Bible. But it goes like this, God opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble.

In a very simple way, here it is. If you come before God and say, Hey, I got life figured out. I don't need you and your rules.

That's pride. He's going to oppose you. He's not going to let you stand before Him with that attitude and get away with it. He just won't. He'll let you suffer the consequences of your choices. He'll bring something to your life that challenges your pride. Something is going to show up in form of opposition. And we can just think of a character in the Bible, and you can probably identify those who did that and how God opposed them.

But the opposite is also true. Stand before Him in humility and say, Lord, I don't got anything. I don't have anything figured out. I am nothing without you. I need you. And He runs to our side like the Father and the prodigal son and throws a coat around us and says, You got it all. I'm here for you.

You're my child. Grace abounds. Now, here's what I want people to hear today. I believe that principle doesn't just work vertically spiritually with God. It works horizontally with every relationship in our life, most notably in marriage.

But it also works in parenting and leadership and pastoral care, whatever it is. I think politicians stand before people in pride and they will oppose you. Stand before your wife in pride, and she will be sick and tired of you in a hurry. And next thing you know, she is pushing back somehow. But stand in humility when you make a mistake, when you find yourself getting, You know what?

I feel inadequate right now, and it's my job to put rails, guardrails on that, and I'm not going to take it out on you. When I say that sort of thing out loud in front of my wife, she breathes a sigh of relief, and she more likely than not has grace for me. She softens. She has more compassion. She's more forgiving. She'll go the extra mile.

Why? Because she sees Ron putting on humility and taking charge of himself. And when Ron does that, he is far more safe to be around.

He's more approachable. But the opposite is also true. If I put on pride and go, Hey, babe, this is your problem, not mine. All of a sudden, she's in opposition to me. And I am undoing myself and I am undoing our us-ness in pride. At the end of the day, this is the core thing that either makes the love languages helpful or not helpful.

The mindful marriage principles helpful or not helpful. Just because you know it doesn't mean you'll do it. And humility is the thing that's going to activate your ability to follow through. I'm thinking about John 15, verse 5, where Jesus said, I'm the vine. You're the branches. You stay connected to me. You bear fruit. And then this statement, without me, you can do nothing.

That's right. And I learned that early in my life. I'm glad that I did. That's why every day I'm crying out for wisdom, God, in this situation, this situation, this situation. I can't do this. Every single day, that has to be our wake-up posture. I often say, I've learned the hard way, that we come to Christ in humility. Lord, help me.

I need you. We walk with him in humility. What does the Lord require of you? Act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God, Micah 6-8. And someday when he comes, every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Christ is. We're going to bow in humility when he comes. It's the before, it's the during, and it's the after of discipleship.

And if we don't do that, then we really cannot learn any of the other virtues and character qualities that we need to have to become more like Christ. Ron, in the book you use the term called fubbing. P-H-U-B-B-I-N-G. What is that? It's a new word. It's a new word.

And how might it affect all of this? Well, because of our mobile phone world, psychologists have come up with a new term. This is partner phone snubbing. Fubbing is when you snub your partner for your phone.

And everybody listening right now knows exactly what I'm talking about. This has either happened to you, you've seen it. You've been in a restaurant and you see two people or a family sitting there and nobody's talking to one another because they're all looking at their phone. Or you've been in bed at night and you're about to turn to your spouse and have a conversation, but they're looking at Facebook and you're like, huh, well, I guess they're interested in that, not so interested in me.

And there you go. Fubbing is a micro affair. And what it says to the partner on the receiving end of that is you're not as important as this thing is. And you feel their disaffection and it will dysregulate in a micro moment because you're like, wait a minute, wait a minute, do I have you or do I not have you? Am I important?

Am I not important? That's a form of dysregulation. And the next thing you know, you're probably going into blame, shame, control or escape.

Escape looks like, well, fine, I'll just look in my phone or I'll watch TV or I'll go in the other room or I'm not talking to you either. That's the withdrawal thing. You know, the shame factor, we haven't talked about shame yet. Talked about blaming control a little bit. Shame is, oh, there must be something wrong with me that I'm uninteresting or not attractive or why would that draw your attention?

And I don't. And so it's this downgrading yourself talk that that's what shame does. So again, everybody's a little different in how they respond in that moment, but you feel the lack of us-ness. And it's growing to be a real problem. There's already research. We haven't been doing the phone thing very long in our society, but there's already research, Kerry, that tells us that these little moments of disaffection can add up to a greater sense of insecurity within relationships. And by the way, this is affecting parenting too. The parenting version of this, they call technoference.

That's where it's interfering with the process of parenting your children. You ask your child, would you please go clean your dishes and put them in the dishwasher? And you turn to your phone and you stare into that. And 20 minutes later, you sort of pop out and you go, oh, your dishes are still there.

Did you not finish it? And you've lost track of your child. You're not doing the behavioral management of your child because you got lost in your phone. And therefore, you're more angry. You go find your child. You're a little harsh because you were the one who got interfered with and didn't follow through. We're already seeing how this affects mothers and their nursing infant instead of staring into the eyes of the infant while the baby nurses.

A mother is staring at her phone, looking away from the child. They're already seeing the brain chemistry changes in infants because of technoference, fubbing. My message to people today is in terms of your us-ness, this is not helpful. We've got to put on self-control. We've got to put on the discipline of saying, not now. Let's have a conversation about when we're going to look at our phones and when we're not and when it's okay and when they need to be off and no responses and turn off the ring and the ding because that's just going to interfere with our us-ness. That's a discipline we have to bring or the phone will get the better of us. I can hear a lot of our listeners thinking, maybe saying out loud, oh, oh, oh, yeah, oh, oh, oh, oh, this makes sense. Please call my husband. Call my husband and tell him. Well, no, I think you're exactly right and I'm glad to hear that there's research being done in that area to demonstrate it because we see it all the time and feel it, you know.

We do. Ron, is there a way to know what my dysregulation or my style of reacting or interacting with my spouse is? Yes, absolutely. The book, The Mindful Marriage, is going to walk you through a process. It's a little bit of a workbook. There's some working exercises in it and it's very revealing and I guarantee you you're going to learn a lot about yourself. So that's one way.

Just get the book and start in. But if you want to just do a quick assessment, we've pulled the assessment out and we've put it online. People can go to worthypub.com slash assessment.

That's worthypub, as in worthy publishers who's doing our book, dot com slash assessment. And you're going to be able to figure out your reactive coping style. Every person on the planet does this.

And we've talked about blame, shame, control and escape. You're going to sort of discover which you're prone to. And I'll just tell you, some people just do one for the most part. Some people are all four. Nan would tell you she's all four and that she does them all really, really well.

I have a couple of them that I'm exceedingly good at. You'll discover who you are. And here's the interesting thing about it and the important thing about this. It's like once you identify that, you can start seeing it show up when you're driving down the highway and somebody cuts you off and you do that quick.

There's your one of your four is going to show up right there in that moment. When a child disobeys or disrespects, you're going to feel that dysregulation. When you feel like you've lost connection with your spouse or a family member or your mother offered another criticism, you're going to feel it and you're going to notice this thing showing up in you. That's the beginning of the journey to saying that's my old self.

Lord, how do I find my new self and put it on in this moment and take charge of this pain? Because that's where the discipline comes in and where we get transformed. And so the work starts just by doing that little assessment.

I think that'll be helpful to a lot of people. Let's just reiterate those four main ways. You mentioned them a couple of times, but let's make sure our listeners hear the four main ways that we respond. Yeah, so in context, a lot of people have heard about fight or flight, reactivity in the brain. And yes, fight and flight takes on four reactive expressions. That's what these coping styles are. And they're blame. That is, there's something about you that's making me feel what I'm feeling. Shame.

There must be something about me that makes me unacceptable or unlovable. Control. Well, I'm just going to take charge of this situation and make it happen on my way, my timetable, criticism, performance. That's the thing I'm really good at. That's all sort of forms of control. And then the last one is escape.

And Gary, that one has multiple forms. I mean, you can escape into your phone and FUB, your partner, like we were just talking about, but you can escape into porn, alcohol, drugs, gambling, excessive work. You can escape into appearance, shopping, spending money. Those are all forms of, I run to something to try to rescue me from the pain that I'm feeling in our us-ness. Again, blame, shame, control, escape seem to be, you know, on one level, they seem to be helpful, but all they do is mask the pain and actually just create more difficulty because now we're bringing something negative back into the us-ness. And it's not just what triggered us, but it's now what we're contributing. And it just escalates in all the wrong directions.

Well, one of the most powerful aspects, I think, of the book is how you're so vulnerable, you and Nan, and you're dealing with your own pain cycles. We talked about this a little to begin with, but why are you so honest? Yeah. Well, you know, it's a good question, Gary. And honestly, I think our profession has not done a good job of this. I see pastors and marriage and family teachers and Bible teachers who maintain a really good image. And I get it.

I did that for a long time. I kind of think we think we're going to lose our ministry or something. But at the end of the day, what's attractive about humbling down is that other people go, oh, it's not just me.

If that's Ron and he's that guy doing that thing, writing those books, doing that, speaking that whatever, then it's not just me and I'm not so horrible. And we're all on this journey together. And I just think the church needs this desperately. How is it that we've had so many high profile church leaders fall in the last 10 years? Pride.

And we sort of let them get away with it. And nobody's saying we got to be humble. Every single one of us has got to fall on our knees before the Lord every single day of our life. So Nan and I, through our journey, we've just decided we're going to be real. We're doing a mindful marriage conference for churches. And in that conference, often we are working through on stage something that happened while we traveled to that event because travel happens to be one of my triggers.

And so I kind of get dysregulated and then we have to deal with it. And we've decided we're not going to be phony. We're going to be as real as we can be and show people how we're making use of this in real time so that they too can find hope in that and find the ability to emulate it. And so I just think it's time we lead out. And here's the thing I've learned, and I know you know this Gary, I'm preaching the choir right now, but when somebody is vulnerable and honest and humble first in a small group, in a Bible study, in a church, when somebody goes first, other people will immediately follow. But if nobody goes first, everybody pretends and everybody keeps the face and the appearance. And we lose the deep intimacy and connection that God wants us to have as his children.

And so somebody's got to go first. I fully agree with that. Now we talked a bit earlier about how people can misuse "The 5 Love Languages" . Do couples, make couples also misuse the insights of the pain cycle? Yes, we actually have a little section in the book. Once we've walked them through and they've discovered their pain and peace cycle, what to do about it, then we give them the cautions. All right, hold on.

Because here's one of the major ones. Oh, I now know more about your pain than I've ever known in the past and I can use it against you. That's dirty play and not fair. And you want to talk about breaking safety.

That'll do it really, really fast. Somebody finally gets vulnerable about what's deep in them and then you use it against them. And the other thing that we sometimes do, and I'm guilty of this one, I got to manage me, is I sense her dysregulation and I'm like, I want to point that out to her. I want to help her with her.

What is that? That's control. That's my control thing kicking in again. No, it is not my... My job is to be compassionate about her pain and curious about her pain, but to not take charge of that pain.

So there's a lot of self-control moments. But when you figure it out, when you get the pathway, I'm telling you, 35 years I've been in marriage and family ministry, nothing has impacted my walk with Christ or my marriage more than this. Well, Ron, as we come near the end of our time together, let's talk a little bit more about how we can help the church be more open to the kind of things we're talking about here and understanding the brain and all of these things and how they affect us, even though we're not even thinking about it so much of the time.

Yeah. Well, we know from Communio that 80% of churches don't spend a dime on marriage education or ministry in a given calendar year. And 75% of churches don't do more than three activities in a given year. Even if a church doesn't spend any money, they do a small group, they have a retreat, they do three or less. That's 75%. Only 25% of churches will do more than that. In other words, we really don't seem to be that invested in helping couples thrive, let alone stay married.

And I don't get that. You and I both know that the context in which we live our most intimate relationships is where God is also growing us up into the image of Christ. You want to talk about discipleship. Everything we've been talking about today is discipleship.

It is growing me. It is maturing me to be more like Jesus. And marriage is the avenue through which God does that. Yes, we got to study the Bible. Yes, we need to teach it. And yes, we need to figure out how to do relationships. And the church really needs to get more active in that way. And not just fun sermons that make people laugh or date nights. I'm all for date nights and good entertainment and a good laugh and let's go out and have a good time, honey. But if that's all we ever get to in our marriage ministry, then I'm not really being challenged.

I'm not really growing. I'm just allowed to laugh and stay as I am. Yeah, no, we can mature. We can do more than that. I want to invite church leaders and couples, because often the couples listening to us right now are the ones who are going to go to their pastor and say, hey, we got an idea. Let's do more.

Let's dive in. Let's get into the deep end with people's lives and relationships, in particular marriage and parenting and family, because so much good happens when we help people do that. And the next generation comes to know the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord.

Yeah. Well, I think this book is going to help that process. And I just want to encourage our listeners, if you're a lay leader in a church and you lead small groups, this is a book you want to get yourself. You want to process it yourself, work through it in your own marriage. And I think you want to be using it in your own marriage.

You want to be using it in small groups in your church. So Ron, thanks for being with us today. And thanks to you and Nan for putting this together and sharing your own journey in such a practical way. Thanks again for all that you have done and are doing. Well, you endorse this book and we are very grateful.

And we just pray the Lord will use it. Well, Ron mentioned that assessment a few minutes ago, and to discover your reactive coping style, go to worthypub.com slash assessment. Again, worthypub.com slash assessment. And the book is at our website, buildingrelationships.us. The mindful marriage, create your best relationship through understanding and managing yourself. Again, go to buildingrelationships.us.

And next week, what does it mean to be pro-abundant life? The president and CEO of Care Net, Roland Warren will join us. A big thank you to our production team today, Steve Wick and Janice Backing. Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman is a production of Moody Radio in Chicago in association with Moody Publishers, a ministry of Moody Bible Institute. Thanks for listening.