Have you tried nagging as a strategy in your marriage?
So how'd that work for you? Guy Leah remembers when his wife Amber decided to quit nagging and start praying. In the Amber going from trying to change me by being upset and nagging and all those things, she didn't suddenly switch gears and say, okay, I'm going to change him by not nagging him and not doing all those things, and he'll eventually change.
This was Amber genuinely saying, you know what? I'm going to take this to the Lord, and I'm going to ask the Lord to change him, and I'm just going to do me. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.
I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. Nagging is just one of those triggers that can lead to marital conflict. We're going to talk about that and other triggers today with Guy and Amber Leah. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.
Thanks for joining us. Back when we were working on the Art of Marriage video project, we got a group of couples together, young couples, and we set up the cameras and we just said, what is it that your spouse does that pushes your buttons? Did they know you were going to ask them that?
So here, I want you to hear what these couples shared with us when we did this. It pushes my buttons. Well, I always ask him, you know, did your mother have you clean up after yourself? Because he'll just be like, oh, I forgot. I didn't think about that. Feeling like there's a lack of respect. He might not be very considerate sometimes. You're so lazy. You have two hands and two feet. Get up and make yourself a bagel.
Like, or make me a bagel, why not? Most fights end up spurring from these very minor emotional disconnects. Well, the last argument we had was about us announcing our pregnancy. I didn't realize it was an issue until just now, still. But I also learned that a lot of these things aren't issues until many of them are piled up.
But it wasn't always like that. When you're fighting, everybody thinks they're right. I'll say, let's be ready at two o'clock. I want to walk out of the door at two. And then at like 2.15, she'll ask me if I was serious. I'll say it in a way like he's like in the military or something and giving me a command. Excuse, excuse, excuse, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We kind of backtrack into like past issues. And then it was like, OK, no, let's talk about this issue. I say this, you say that, and back and forth, back and forth. The only time I really feel like there's any guilt is if like deep down you're like, all right, I'm probably not right. I'm probably just arguing to win this. Sometimes, you know, the emotion overtakes the logic.
He felt belittled or like less of a person or that I was insulting him in some way. So hearing those couples talk about those things, I think all of us are going, I want to know, Bob. Yes. What do you want to know? What does Mary Ann says triggers you? Yeah, let's hear it. Oh, no, there's been nothing. There's been nothing that's been triggering for me.
I'm I am going to have to think about that because we we generally have a pretty peaceful relationship, but I think all of us have those. Come on. You can't think of anything she'd say. Well, here's here's an illustration. Oh, here's one.
We're going to dig one out. This happened a few weeks ago. She was gone visiting her mom.
I was at home. It was the day before trash day. And I had just taken the trash cans up to the curb and she calls a few minutes later and she says, don't forget tomorrow's trash day. And my first reaction, this wasn't her fault. This was my first reaction is like, like, don't you think I know how to take care of myself?
Like I can take the trash up like you think I need an appointment secretary to fill me in on all of this. And then I realized that's my issue. That's not her issue. She's trying to be helpful. She wasn't trying to be my my mother and all of this. So I had to pull back and go, it's not her. In this case, it was the trigger. Wasn't her.
It was me. See, Bob is just more mature than we are. Do you have a trigger? Is there something? We have so many triggers.
No, we have none. We're not going to talk about any of them. We are going to talk about a bunch of them because we've got some guys here with us today who are thrilled to have with us.
They're the trigger experts. We can relate to these guys. Guy and Amber Leah are joining us on Family Life Today. Guys, welcome. Thank you. We're so glad to be here. Amber's been here before. We're here with Wendy Speak to talk about parenting triggers, things your kids do that cause you as a parent to go into the unhappy place.
Very unhappy place sometimes. And now you two have written a book on marriage triggers. And you had to get I was told this, that you had to go line up people to talk to because you didn't have any of your own that you could bring. I wish that were true.
We have a lot to pull from. Guy, how did she recruit you into this world? You know, she actually wanted to write this with Wendy. And Wendy gave her her blessing to go on and write it herself. And I think Amber had kind of started to think about doing that by herself. And then she said, Well, wait a minute, I should do this with my husband.
With my trigger. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, and so as soon as she said it to me, I was a little shocked as I'd never in my life thought I would write a book.
But here we are. I also, you know, come from a background where I have a hard time reading books by PhDs and these people that are so well known in have well studied, I have always needed to hear from someone who's in the trenches. And so I felt this is an opportunity for us to share our trenches and hopefully have a different perspective on these triggers. And are you triggered by writing together? You know, praise God, there were lots of smooth processes through writing together, mostly because we tag teamed, you know, we took turns in that process. But yes, of course. And I think that's one of the things we want people to understand is, and you guys know this, when you write a marriage book together or a parenting book, it does not mean that you don't have these issues and that you never will again. Oh, exactly.
It just means that you've been through it and you've had some growth and encouragement and you want to share it with others. You guys identify in the book 31 common marriage triggers. One for every day of the month. Did you sit down and brainstorm a list or how did you come up with these 31?
Yeah, that's a great question. Amber looked back at our marriage and wrote down all the things that I have done and said, wow, I've got 31 to start. We started there. You know, with our parenting triggers book, Wendy and I, you know, we do a lot of travel. We hear from readers all the time. It's been an amazing ministry. And everywhere we went, we heard people say to us, this book's been so helpful in my parenting and I am applying it to other relationships too. But I sure wish that there was a specific book about triggers in marriage. And so right from the start for several years, God had planted that seed in my heart, but I was resistant to it because we had a difficult marriage for a lot of years. And just because you become vulnerable in one area of your life in ministry doesn't mean you're always in a hurry to peel back another layer and expose yourself. And so it took a lot of prayer and me just being willing to say, okay, Lord, if this is really what you want me to do, then we'll move forward and do it.
And we're thankful we did. Okay. You just cracked the door open. So I'm pushing it open a little farther, a difficult marriage for a number of years. Yes.
Yes. A triggered marriage. And I think what we realized is, you know, there wasn't like a big case of adultery or some major conflict that happened, but for us, there was just this, we settled into a place of unhappiness and we couldn't put our finger on it. Like why are we unhappy?
Why are we bickering so much? And we could tell that there was a tone and a culture that was being fostered in our home that we didn't realize was there until one day we just looked at each other and we were pretty far apart and we began to invite God into our marriage and it started with me needing to be humble because I spent a lot of years nagging and a lot of years yelling and a lot of years pointing fingers. And then finally the Lord was like, Amber, why don't you stop trying to fix Guy?
Because that's not working. Why don't you just do what you would like him to do for you? The golden rule, right?
Do unto others as you would have them do to you. And I thought, okay, Lord, I'll try that. And as soon as I said, okay, Lord, work on me, I began to realize that Guy's sin did not justify my own. And when I recognized that little by little, we grew back together again, but it was by identifying all those little things, you know, being a backseat driver, poor communication skills when the house was a mess, when we were not parenting on the same page, all these little things that just added up.
We began to tackle one of them at a time in our own marriage. Now, Guy, did you notice a change because, you know, I'm hearing Amber's story and it's pretty similar and had a similar thing. And I noticed something changed. Did you notice when Amber started maybe stop nagging or I don't know what she did.
I want to know what she did. Yes, I did notice. So we came into marriage. We got married later in life. And I think... We were old, you can say it.
Yes. We were a little older. I was fairly set in my single ways. And you know, I was... How old were you when you got married? I was 37. Thirty-seven. Thirty-seven, yeah. And 38 years of singleness, you developed, this is how life is supposed to be. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I had a thriving career as an executive. I had my own, you know, an apartment that I lived in that I had was very well taken care of and I just had my own ways. And so I think I came into marriage with a picture of being this amazing husband.
But the day-to-day, I didn't realize what that really meant. And a big piece for me that caused me a three-year stumble, I'd say, in our marriage was when we got married, three months later, we got pregnant. So I never had a foundation of a relationship with my wife as friends and as a young married couple. We literally exchanged wedding registry gifts for baby gifts or for baby room, you know. And Amber, did you get morning sickness?
I was exceedingly ill my whole pregnancy. Yeah. Yeah. Almost nine months. So you guys had three months, basically.
Yeah. And that three months, I was an executive, so I was working 16-hour days. I'd come home from work and have an hour or two with her. She'd go to bed and I'd stay up working for another couple of hours.
I'd wake up early in the morning and work. So we didn't even have an opportunity to have much of a relationship. So it really caused a lot of tension in the beginning. So when she started to back off from nagging, did you go, hang on, what's going on here?
Yes, I did. And I forget exactly what that point was, but I did notice, and it was a relationship difference between us. I had more room to kind of grow, and I think that I also noticed it's that thing where I would push back pridefully and try to fight, and she wouldn't engage. And it caused me to go, well, wait a minute, what am I doing?
Why is she not engaging? And this is my own stuff, and it just created an air for me to grow. What you're talking about, this is interesting, because a lot of people who start to feel the conviction that you were talking about, Amber, where you say, I think the Lord wants me to just work on my stuff and back off, what they're afraid of is that if I back off and I'm not nagging, he's going to think everything's okay. He's going to just keep in the dysfunction.
It's going to grow. I'm going to make things worse. Like almost like Ann said, like enabling this behavior. Why would I ever back off? He'll think I'm happy then, and then he'll be worse. And so the fact that her being gentler, kinder, caused you to go, wait, hang on, there must be something going on here. That doesn't always happen for couples. Sometimes the guy's like, I'm just glad she quit nagging. Now I can go back to my old bad dysfunctional ways, right?
Yeah. So practically speaking, one of the changes was that instead of yelling and being angry or bitter and withdrawing, because I tried all the things, right? All the dysfunctional things I tried to do and they weren't working.
And so what I recognized is that I had this really unhealthy pattern and I had to replace it with a healthy pattern. So while I also stopped yelling and doing the nagging and all of those things, and not perfectly, Guy will tell you, we rented a car when we got here and there was some backseat driving that still happened even this week. So I'm still a work in progress, mind you. But what I recognized is what I need to do is set a regular time period with my husband where I come together and communicate proactively and biblically. So this is about exchanging those angry reactions for a gentle biblical response. And so I would start saying to Guy, if there were five things I was bent out of shape about, I could just every day do the huff and puff or the eye roll or make the statement under my breath, right?
None of that was working, it wasn't godly. Or I could say, okay, there's five things I'm a little concerned about right now with my husband with Guy. But I'm going to set aside a time and ask him if we can just have some coffee together on Saturday morning. And would he be willing to just hear something that I want to work on in myself? And then maybe I can also gently bring up one thing that I would like him to consider about his approach with me.
Did you say that? Not overtly at first, but I think that he saw that I was trying to make an effort. And in that moment, he was able to open up and I was able to open up because here's the thing. When you come to somebody and you are trying to demonstrate the fruit of the Spirit toward them in a very proactive and intentional way over and over and over again, it is very difficult for that not to impact the other person. You are going to have a positive impact. In those rare cases where you don't, you may need counseling, there may be some further professional help, but ultimately, I just recognized I need to not just clam up and do my own thing and let the Lord work on me. I also need to talk with Guy proactively and say, hey, this is an area I'm trying to work on.
Will you pray for me? So Guy, those were meetings that you actually, like when I first heard you say it, I'd be like, oh no. If Ann's saying let's talk at 10 a.m. Saturday as our husband, I'd be like, oh no, it's one of those kind of talks. I'm leaving for work one day and Mary Ann says, when you get home tonight, we need to talk.
And I'm going, don't do that at the beginning of the day now. The whole day is like, seriously? So when a man feels that, he automatically thinks he's in trouble?
Yes. Well, yeah. When a man hears that, how many times is he not in trouble?
Tell me that. So that conversation wouldn't be just how amazing you are, it's you're in trouble. Yeah, we're in trouble, but what I just heard Amber say is, yeah, you got down at 10 a.m. to talk, but the way she did it, totally different than what most people would think. So that's why I'm asking, like, did that become like, oh, this is going to be a good thing because it isn't just going to be about me. It was the way she did it, the approach wasn't, I want to sit you down to tell you what I'm upset about. It was, can we sit down and talk about us and can we talk about a few specific things?
And the first time or two, I think it was a little rough, but we came together to do it. And we both knew that it was important, but it was the way that she approached me. But one thing I have to say, just backtrack just a tiny bit, is that in the Amber going from trying to change me by being upset and nagging and all those things, she didn't suddenly switch gears and say, okay, I'm going to change him by not nagging him and not doing all those things and he'll eventually change.
So it wasn't a manipulation. Yeah, well, this wasn't a Tom Sawyer, I'm going to whitewash the fences and hope someone else comes along and picks up the job. This was Amber genuinely saying, you know what, I'm going to take this to the Lord and I'm going to ask the Lord to change him. And I'm just going to do me and I'm going to love on him no matter what.
I'm going to exemplify these things. I'm going to pursue my faith. And that's what I started to see.
I started to see her go deeper into her faith. And it was a coffee date. And I know my husband that he loves his coffee. So he was like, if coffee's involved, I'll talk about anything. I have to tell you, I think you've picked up on something pretty key here. And that is that the wife or the husband that says, I think we need to have this heart to heart talk.
If you don't do the spiritual work in your own life first to make sure you're in the right place, the right posture, humble yourself before the Lord, come ready to confess your own stuff. Right. You're not ready to have that talk until that's what it's going to look like. Yep.
Yeah. That's a beautiful example. I mean, a listener could, right now, go do this. And like Bob said, like you guys said, start with me, not with him or her. Start with me and lead with that.
And then hopefully... But I got to go way back because I'm wondering if anybody's thinking this, how do I know when I'm triggered? I mean, your whole concept is about marriage triggers. And I think we know, but I want to make sure, am I being triggered or is this just a little pebble in my shoe? Or is this a trigger? And you start the book, talk about triggers and anger and that kind of thing. Talk about that a little bit. Well, you know, marriage is very, I think we all agree, it's a very organic relationship.
It changes day to day, month to month, year to year. So there are some triggers that are not going to come out of me until year five in my marriage when we suddenly have two kids and I come home from work and she's handing me a kid and I've had a rough day at work, but she hasn't asked me about my day yet. And she's just like stressed and gives me the baby and poopy diaper, the whole deal. And suddenly there's a trigger that's going to come out of nowhere. We talked about in our book, there's external triggers and internal triggers.
And a lot of those come from things that are very deep seated that we get from our in-laws, things that we have from our childhood. Do all triggers involve anger? Well, you know, I think anger takes different forms.
Some people become really withdrawn and they back away. It's not always throwing dishes against the wall. So, and there is righteous anger. This is one of the things that I studied early on when I was recognized, I had anger issues and I asked the Lord to reveal to me how to change. I saw that righteous anger is a thing.
We will get angry. But the problem was, is that I was often misplacing my anger and directing it to the wrong person. I would direct it towards my kids and they triggered me. I direct my anger towards them.
Guy triggered me. I direct my anger and lash out at him. When really I knew that it was our enemy, Satan, like if my kids were sinning, if guy was sinning, I shouldn't just get mad at them and take it personally. Really I should be more concerned that that's an affront to God. Like they're sinning against God, not me ultimately. And so that gave me some freedom to depersonalize it and make it more about, okay, none of us has arrived yet.
My kids still need some more coaching and parenting. My husband still needs more grace and so do I. So thinking about it that way was really, really helpful. And I do think it's interesting that you said a trigger can be not angry, you know, because you think it's almost like passive aggressive. It's like, you know, if your wife or your spouse says, oh, I think you're, you're being triggered right now. You're like, no, I'm not angry, but everything you're doing is you're just, and it might be even what you said at the beginning, Ephesians 4 26 is as a believer, as a follower of Christ, you're thinking anger is sin, you know, cause we're told, don't let the sun go down on your anger.
And I've heard many think anger, sin, it's like, no, it doesn't say anger, sin at all. It's actually a God given emotion, but if you don't handle it correctly, it can really lead to a foothold for the enemy. So what you just said is really critical because I'm thinking sometimes we're like, I'm not being triggered at all right now. And you're like, everything you're doing is in a non angry way saying you're really bugged by me and you're pulling away from me.
So it's, it's both and right. It could be outbursts of anger, but it could be, you could be triggered in many different ways. I do think it's interesting too, what you talked about as really you're saying some of the reasons we're triggered could be old wounds that haven't been processed and we carry those in. And so maybe Dave does something that's not that big of a deal, but it's triggering me because of my past.
Is that what you're saying? Yeah, definitely. And I didn't realize this at first, but I've come to discover that marriage is and can be a vehicle for healing from our pasts if we allow it to be. So instead of looking at guys past wounds and his differing personality and all of those things and letting them trigger me, I can look at that and go, maybe this is an area where I can be a vehicle of healing and grace and comfort to him. I can show him empathy. I can show him compassion instead of taking it personally. Do you have an example of that?
Well, yeah. I mean, Guy and I talk about in Marriage Triggers that he had this background where his family was very, very supportive. He had a lot of love and acknowledged his accomplishments and things like that. And I was kind of like more of the tough love side of things growing up. And so I never knew what was going to be coming down the pipeline with my family. My parents came out of a really difficult cult and it was a very separatist movement. And long story short, they were excommunicated and they talk about this. They let us tell their story. But they had a rough time of it when my brother and I were young. They were just trying to grasp what the world was.
And then some people invited them to church and they started going to a Christian church and little by little things began to improve in our home life. But in my younger years, it was really hard. And so I have this strong sense of justice because I didn't have a lot of justice. Everything was sort of, you never knew why you were in trouble kind of thing.
But then with Guy, he rarely got in trouble because he was really just doted on. And that was great. I'm glad he had that experience. I worked hard for the dummy. I recognize that past wound in myself was just this need for justice. So I wasn't about to let him get away with anything. In our marriage.
It's like, oh no. And I will say, I have a slight issue with procrastination. Slight probably means a big issue, Amber. Is that true? Yeah.
I'm going to choose wisely to hold my tongue in this moment. It was aided throughout my entire youth in that my family always stepped up to help me in times of need instead of allowing me to flounder and find my own success. So I had a lot of support and did quite well, but parents did projects for me, those kinds of things. And it wasn't that I was dumb or anything. I just was doing other things.
He had a lot of helpers. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, I mean... Well, go ahead. No, just so getting into marriage, Amber's the exact opposite. And she is ultra successful. If she has something that is due in two months, she does it today.
She is a get it done now kind of person. So that was an area where we had a really big misfire. And so that was an area where she had to offer a lot of grace in learning our first couple of years of marriage about that piece of me that she didn't know about going into marriage. So our backgrounds, our childhoods, our personalities, our wounds, all of those come out. And I haven't heard too many people say it the way you just said that marriage can be a healing of the wounds. You often think, and it should be that way. I think that's God's design and plan. But we often think marriage just brings them out and makes them worse because they trigger and you don't respond well. And many marriages end because the wounds were really never healed.
They were never embraced. And I mean, even when you said that, I thought one of our big triggers, and it's a trigger for 40 years, is my schedule. I'm sure you've experienced anything, but busy, busy, doing a lot of different things, always had five jobs at once, and she would always be on me. And I'd be like, what's your problem? I am providing. That's why I do this. It's not about me.
This is about you. I did not know for decades it was out of a wound. She felt from her family of origin, who I love, not seen. They didn't see her.
She was the last child and everybody else was. And then it's like, oh my goodness, she's not being seen. Here it is again. Dave's off doing his thing and he doesn't see me. And so for the last, hopefully a decade or more, it's been like, I get the chance.
What a dream come true. I get the chance to reveal Christ to her by seeing her and loving her and knowing that was at the heart of that trigger. It was that, and I could have been like, you know what, I can't take this anymore.
I'm out. All you do is nag and complain about me being gone rather than maybe God wants to use me and us to heal through this trigger. What an important perspective to have on this, that when God brings us together, there's going to be some stuff that's going to float to the surface and we're going to go, oh, that's there. I didn't know that was there. It's there so it can be skimmed off, removed, taken away, dealt with, rather than— Healed. Yeah, healed. Exactly. And I'll just say this.
If it doesn't just float to the surface, but like a bomb, it loads it out of the water, you better take a close look. But isn't that like communication, the importance? I know everyone says, oh, communication, communication, but it really is communication because had she not shared that with you, you still would not know why she keeps reacting that way. And then understanding what does trigger you, understanding where those hidden spots are that can be easily provoked. This is the service you guys have done for us in the book you've written called Marriage Triggers, Exchanging Spouses, Angry Reactions for Gentle Biblical Responses. That's what we want in marriage. And this week, we're making your book available to Family Life Today listeners. Those of you who would like to get a copy of Guy and Amber's book, Marriage Triggers, it's our thank you gift to you this week when you support the Ministry of Family Life Today. Your donations to this ministry make programs like this possible, our website, our app, all of the different ways we're trying to provide practical biblical help and hope for marriages and families. You make all of that happen when you donate to support the ongoing work of this ministry. We're grateful for you, grateful for our legacy partners who give each month.
And those of you who from time to time will say, I want to pitch in and help, thank you for that. If you can make a donation today, again, request your copy of the book Marriage Triggers by Guy and Amber Leah. Go to familylifetoday.com to give an online donation or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate by phone. Thanks in advance for your support and we know you're going to enjoy the book Marriage Triggers by Guy and Amber Leah. Let me also mention, if you've got a couple's small group that you're a part of and you've been thinking, what should we go through, we've got video series available here at Family Life and we've also got workbooks that are available. If you want to do a series on marriage, Dave and Ann Wilson's Vertical Marriage video series, the Love Like You Mean It video series, the Art of Marriage series, if you're looking for study guides you can go through, we've got family life couple studies available, one on the gospel in your marriage, the power of humility in your marriage, your marriage has a mission.
You can find out about all of these studies when you go to our website, familylifetoday.com. If your small group is looking for something to go through, if it's been a while since you've talked about marriage, put that on the agenda and use one of the resources we've developed here at Family Life. And we hope you can join us back here tomorrow when we're going to continue our conversation with Guy and Amber Leah about the things that provoke us to anger, that irritate us in marriage and how we deal with that.
How do we respond to those irritations biblically? We'll talk more about that tomorrow. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, who got some extra help today from Bruce Goff, of course our entire broadcast production team has been involved in today's program. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine, we will see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Hope for today, hope for tomorrow.
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