Breaking the Cycle of Fighting

In marriage, all of us have ways we can irritate one another.

For Guy and Amber Leah, one of the challenges they faced was just the reality that their days were very different days. I'd be at work all day long. I'm getting to go step away to the coffee maker and get coffee.

I have great meetings in my office. I'm going to lunch with friends, but I'd come home and not understand her world and the difficulty of taking care of a colicky acid reflux child. Who never slept. Who never slept. She never got sleep.

But I would come home and not have that perspective of understanding what her world was like all day long. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. The Bible tells us we are to bear one another's burdens or at least have empathy for one another. We'll talk today about how we can cultivate that in marriage. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today. Thanks for joining us.

One of the things we have said for years at the Family Life Weekend to Remember Marriage Getaway. I'm wondering which of these things you're gonna pull out right now. I remember one of our co-speakers, our friend Gary Rosberg, was up on the platform one time and he said, all right, let's just get it out of the way. I got conflict. You got conflict. All God's children got what? Conflict. And he just said, here's the principle. Conflict is common to every marriage and the goal of marriage is not to be conflict free. That's a pie in the sky.

That's never gonna happen. It's two sinful people living together. There's gonna be conflict.

The goal is to know how to handle conflict rightly when it occurs. I remember listening to an episode of Focus on the Family years ago. Gary Smalley was on and Gary said, I'm gonna tell you. Here's Gary Smalley talk like this. He said, I'm gonna tell you the one thing, the one skill, if a couple can can get this skill down, it's the one skill that makes all the difference in marriage. And I'm listening.

I go, I'm co-hosting a marriage and family radio show. I should know what this one skill is and I don't know. I keep listening and he says, it's the ability to resolve conflict. If you know how to resolve conflict, he was saying, that's gonna take care of so many issues.

And I thought, well, that makes sense. You're gonna have conflict if you know how to deal with it. You can have oneness in your marriage. If you don't know how to deal with it, you're gonna be in isolation. Yeah, and the marriage guru John Gottman says the same thing, you know, and he's really an expert on it. It comes down to that. I remember at our church we've done many marriage conferences and weekend series, but one year we said we're gonna do four, two days of marriage conference at our church only on one thing. Every talk will be about one thing, conflict.

Because we all know how to have it, few of us know how to resolve it. We thought, okay, that's gonna limit the number of people come because it's just sold out in like 30 minutes. Like 3,000 people, bam! We're there like, whoa, you just hit something. Our church attendance actually grew.

Yeah, during that series. Yeah, we've got Guy and Amber Leah joining us this week on Family Life Today. Guys, welcome back.

Thank you. I guess they're here because they have conflict. Like every other marriage in the world, Guy and Amber live in Southern California.

They're involved in video production and all kinds of projects in the in the entertainment industry. Amber's been here before. She and Wendy Speak wrote a book on the triggers, the way parents get triggered by their kids and how we deal with that. And now Guy and Amber have brought that wisdom to bear on the marriage relationship with a book on marriage triggers. And you list 31 triggers in this book. Where do you want to start?

Which trigger? Well, I mean, obviously, you know, you're the authors and you're the experts, but you have the external triggers that come from the outside and often other people and then internal. But the first one, I'm one of those people that likes to read real books by real people. Not that I don't like experts, but, you know, people. And when I, you know, when we wrote our book, the first response from one of our friends was, wow, you're so real.

I think our marriage is a lot better than yours. And when I read your book, I felt the same thing. I'm like, wow, they are so real. And the first trigger.

They really messed up those things. And that's why we loved it. Oh, loved it from the start.

And I did not expect the first chapter to be where you started. And I found myself going, oh, this is, this is universal. I'm guessing almost every couple's felt it. So you call the first trigger when you married Mr. Wrong or Miss All Wrong.

Yes. And Amber wrote this chapter, so, and it's it's about your own marriage, but walk us through that one. Yeah, I'll let Amber talk about the chapter, but I will say this was a surprise post that came out of Amber when she's a blogger.

They kind of, where it started, and I didn't know she was posting it until after I read it online. And then I understood where it was going, and it really, I think, defines our relationship and how we like to share and are okay with our dirty laundry being shown. I wrote that, you know, this chapter is an extended version of that that little blog post, and I had written that after Guy and I worked through some pretty big hurdles and triggers in our own marriage. And so what I realized when I was wallowing in a lot of my anguish early on, because we were so triggered and and had such a difficult marriage for so long, was that I felt a lot of the time like maybe I had just married the wrong person. Did I make a mistake here?

Did he make a mistake? Did I marry Mr. Wrong? And then the Lord began to show me that he had married Miss All Wrong, and that's when things began to turn is when I acknowledged my own part in this battle that we were fighting against each other. And so I want to give hope and encouragement to couples who are in that place today.

You know, they're listening and they're going, I have felt that. Like, I've wondered if I married the wrong person. Is this Mr. Wrong?

Is this Miss All Wrong? And so what I discovered as I decided to lean into the Lord and say, Lord, I can't change Guy. I have been trying and trying and trying, and it has gotten me nowhere except in a place of sorrow and conflict. And this is not life to the full that you said you came to give us life to the full, and we're not experiencing it. So, Lord, start with me.

You've got to just dial in with me. And I realized that nobody was going to be Mr. Right, because we are fallen people.

We're sinful, fallen people. And, you know, he has his unique personality and issues. I have my unique personality and issues, and then our marriage is going to have its own unique personality and its own issues. And so we needed to come together and work through them together, recognizing that I didn't marry the wrong person.

He didn't marry the wrong person. The moment we said I do, we became a match made in heaven, because we had made a vow and a commitment. So if you are married and you've made those vows, you are a match made in heaven. Yeah, and you said, in your book, you said our spouses were never meant to be our Savior or the source of our happiness. I'm guessing it's one of the reasons I love that chapter, because our book, Vertical Marriage, it was that thing. It's like everybody thinks they married the wrong person, but we say you're looking in the wrong place, because you're looking to your spouse. And you discovered it's about me changing me and finding it there, which is a powerful way, I thought, to start the book, because you go vertical.

You go take your eyes off of each other from the very beginning, put them on him, put him on yourself, and then say, okay, let's go on a journey. And then trigger number two, and there's no way we're gonna go through all 31, but this is a big one for us. And I love it, and based on the research, it's one of the ones that rises up from your couples, is the house being a mess.

How is that a trigger for people? Oh, man. You remember, we talked about before, you know, we got married late on. And we talked about your clean and tidy apartment. So add in the dirty house coming home from a busy day at work, and in my wrong perspective, thinking that my wife should have things nice by the time I get home, I think really changed, caused a lot of problems in the beginning. With a baby on each hip, and a broom in my mouth, I guess.

I bet that came over really well. Especially, let's just all say, every listener can agree, when you have little kids, your house is always a messy. It's turmoil, yeah.

There's paraphernalia about the child center. You can't help it. Well, my clutter tolerance is higher than my wife's clutter tolerance. I mean, I can look and go, I'm comfortable with this.

Yeah. There's a little table right next to my chair in the den. So I'll sit in that chair, and that table gets piled up with some books and some papers, and there are some remote controls and some flash drives. I think I saw eight remote controls, Bob. There's a bunch of stuff on that table. I know where everything is. It's in arm's reach.

It's good. Mary Ann will periodically look at that table and go, can we straighten that up? And I go, straighten it up? It'll just be messy and weak again. Why don't we straighten it up?

This stuff drives me crazy. I'm a clean person. I would have found that table in the trash. She wouldn't have asked me to clean it up.

It would have been removed. Amber, you'll understand how messed up this is. Like, I just thought you have expectations of yourself even when you have little kids. And I think I am never going to let my house get messy.

Boy, yes. So then I'm thinking I'm going to teach our son to not be messy. So I give him this little apron thing. Like, I'm going to clean the house and I'm going to teach him.

He's like two. And I put this little squirt bottle in there and a little dusting cloth. And I'm patting myself.

Look at Bob's face. You scar your two-year-old with giving him an apron. And he likes it. He likes spraying everything all over the place. And he's creating more mess than a help. And you know what?

I totally gave up on that. And this child is an amazing man. But I'm telling you, if he came in my house right now and he walked through it and I came home later, I could tell he was there because every cabinet's open. He doesn't see any of the mess. And I just think... It drives you crazy. It does, but it's who he is. So you're the messier of the two, right?

Well, I think by virtue of the fact that I did a lot of the child rearing for a long time. Yeah, it's true. I wouldn't say she's the messier of the two by any means.

Really? But I would definitely say I felt powerless often to make it as neat as I wanted it to be. So I'm triggered by my own mess and my kid's mess.

And then with him coming home and having that expectation was just a recipe for disaster. So you got some people listening right now that go, I'm sorry, but this is really a big deal to me. To walk into a messy house is just...

I cannot do it. I've got to have some help. And the other spouse is going, well, then have the maid come at 3.30 because there's no way I can do all of this and give you your clean house. How do these couples deal with this thing?

Practically, it's a real thing. And so Guy and I had to, again, have a loving, honest conversation. Like if you are not willing to top these things off, we've got to figure out this messy house situation. There were things I could have done practically to make it a little bit more appealing aesthetically for him when he came in the door. Likewise, there were things that he could have done to adjust his expectation and also to chip in in certain ways. And so we had that conversation. All right, practically, what can we do?

Like, what's the biggest problem for you when you come home? Like, I can't do all 10 things, but I can tackle a few of them at a time. And so we had to strategize, you know, the shoes everywhere. OK, I got a basket, put it by the front door, put the shoes in it. You know, so we do have to get practical. Maybe we can hire somebody to come and help us with certain things. You know, maybe that investment is worth it if we're able.

I think that's smart. And when I look at people, I think, what is the deeper issue? For me, that cleanliness, there were some deeper issues of our views of a clean home. We have a friend where his wife just was a messy.

She had five boys, their house, they had kids in and out all the time, and her husband had these high expectations. And I finally said, get a cleaner. Just get someone to come to the house. You have the money. Just hire somebody who goes, no, I'm teaching her a lesson. No, that isn't that kind of thing.

Yeah, right. I think there was a big shift in perspective that I needed to make, though, too, because I would leave from work, you know, 830 in the morning. I'd be at work all day long. I'm getting to go step away to the coffee maker and get coffee. I have great meetings in my office.

I'm going to lunch with friends. But I'd come home and not understand what her world was like. And the difficulty of taking care of a colicky acid reflux child who never slept. She never got sleep. I actually didn't get sleep because we kind of co-dealt with those issues at nighttime. But I would come home and not have that perspective of understanding what her world was like all day long. Well, I'm guessing at your office there was a cleaning crew that came in regularly. And you never saw them, but you just expected this is how the world should be.

Things should be cleaned up overnight while I'm sleeping. My neighbor's barely hanging on. And ultimately, we came to a place spiritually where we had to recognize that Jesus's model for us, it says that he came to serve, right? That he came to serve.

He didn't come to gain his own glory or his own ambition. He came to serve. So Guy and I had to put on this attitude of we need to serve one another just like Jesus did. Jesus served to the point of death on the cross for our sin. So is there some way that I can get over myself and think about how can I serve Guy?

Because if we say we love our spouses, but we're not really willing to serve them, then our definition of love is not biblical. We talked about if you're going to have these kinds of conversations as a couple, you need to come spiritually prepared, humble, ready to deal with your own stuff. I think the other thing that's so critical here is you guys came with an understanding you're not my enemy. We've got an issue. We can put the issue on the table. We can talk together about how do we resolve this issue without it being, well, it's your fault. No, it's your fault.

No, let's figure out what's the issue. What's the best way to get there? And we're probably both going to have to adjust a little bit to get there. The thing is, Bob, is that we love the Lord. You may not have been able to tell that some days in our house, but we love the Lord. And we knew that we wanted to be an example of him.

We wanted to be a testimony of him to our children under our own roof. If we are constantly fighting each other, we are powerless to fight the better fight, the bigger fight. And so how can we be an impact in our neighborhood, in our own home, in our world, if we can't even get our act together? It was sobering when we realized that we were spending so much energy fighting each other. We didn't have any energy to fight the better fight that God called us to. To be a light.

Even in this chapter, as simple as it is, here's what you said. Instead of huffing and puffing as you walk into the room and see the clutter, jump in with an attitude willing to serve. One of the practical things that I would do is on my way home from work, I would call Amber and say, check in and say, how was the day? What's going on? Oh, that's smart. My underlying thought was, what am I walking into? So I could park out in the driveway and I could give myself 30 minutes and I could have a perspective shift and go like, okay, I've had a busy day, but I know my wife has to do too. So I'm now going to walk in through that door and I'm going to be purposeful about caring for her for a few minutes and seeing what needs to be done. Jump in, do it, and then my needs will get met in a little bit.

If both couples came to each other and said, what can I do for you right now? Yeah. Just simple as that. Yeah. All of us met each other at the door and said, what can I do for you right now?

You know, Jinx, you're it. You know, it's an attitude shift that we have to make, but it's hard to know how to implement that attitude shift in the day-to-day moment. I've seen a definition of leadership being that.

A great leader walks up to the people he's leading every day, he or she, and says, how can I help you? Yeah. And that's what you're saying.

Absolutely. I want to ask you about another trigger, and, Anne, it's one I've heard you mention as you talk with wives. They're often triggered by the passivity of their husband, especially in spiritual matters. Why doesn't he do this? Why doesn't he read the Bible to the kids?

Why doesn't he lead us in prayer? Blah, blah, blah. You've heard Anne talk about that? I've heard her. I don't know why she would ever. I've heard her say that as she talks to wives. Yeah, there you go. Good. That's what she teaches often.

So, Amber, you address this in the book. This was a big one for me. I'll tell you, of all the triggers, I think this was the biggest disappointment for me early on, is that I felt like we were going to be that family where my husband set me up behind a white picket fence and he went to work. And, I mean, all I ever wanted to do was, I had a 10-year teaching career.

I loved it. But when I had my first son, I was ready to come home. And the Lord has obviously gotten me real involved in all kinds of other things since then. He often adjusts our expectations, but his ways are higher than ours and that's a good thing. But with Guy, I just recognized that in spiritual leadership, he was not meeting my expectation there either. And I thought, he's going to come home from dinner and he's going to have a Bible lesson ready. He's going to ask me what my prayer requests are and he's going to follow up.

He might even have a praise report to offer me. Amber, we are twins. This is exactly what I thought and I think a lot of women do. We do.

And I discovered that, you know, in talking with other families, that this was a need that a lot of women had or their expectation. Okay, I just got to stop right here. Yeah. Does that man exist somewhere in the world? There's a couple of ours.

I think they do. I always thought Dennis Rainey was there. He might be Dennis Rainey. I work with him. Dennis Rainey's not that guy. Thank you, Bob. He'd tell you he's not that guy.

Finally. And I call this a churchical thing and not a biblical thing. And churchical is a word that I kind of made up because I thought this is something that in the church we think is a thing or it's a verse and it's not.

It's just a churchical idea that has really become a yoke of slavery on a lot of men in particular, I think, and then on women and their expectations. And so what I began to do is be on the lookout to recognize that Guy, his walk is different from mine. And so why am I putting him in a box of what I think that spiritual leadership should look like? He was far better at connecting with our boys in different ways spiritually than I was. My strength was memorizing Bible verses. My strength was doing Bible study. And so I got to a place where I let go my pressure of Guy to be the Bible study leader and I let him organically breathe life into our children spiritually in his unique way. And I was comfortable with, okay, if we're going to memorize verses together, that's going to be my role. So I'm going to do that. It's my strength. I'm going to do the, you know, the memorization songs and all those things with our kids.

And that's okay. Instead of being bitter about it, I got to a place where I embraced my spiritual strengths and I appreciated Guy's spiritual strengths, which were different, didn't mean they were wrong. It's like putting on a lens of seeing their strengths instead of your expectations of what you thought it would look like. I remember when one of our sons, he was probably 15 and he was listening to this CD and I'm priding myself like I'm so strong spiritually and I'm doing such a good job with our kids spiritually. And I see this CD that our son is looking at.

I'm a verbal processor. And so I look at it and I say, are you kidding me? Like this is from Satan himself rolling these lyrics. And so I take it out of a CD player and I throw it in the trash. I'm like, that's where that belongs. And then I watch Dave comes over, he pulls it out of the trash can and I'm thinking, what are you doing? He goes, sits down beside CJ and he says, CJ, tell me about this music that you like.

Tell me all about it. And here I was thinking I'm all righteous and this is the way to do it. And I'm thinking, oh, he's so much smarter. Did I just get a compliment? You got a compliment? I don't think I got it that day.

It's because I was prideful. I will say this, and I wonder if you've ever heard this. And I don't even know if it's true, but I was in seminary just early in our marriage and the discussion was on the Greek model of teaching and the Hebrew model.

You ever heard of that, Bob? It was simply this, Greek model's more like we do in school. You sit down, you teach a lesson, three weeks we'll have a test on this, memorize it all, come back.

Hebrew is apprentice along the way. By the way, you ever heard that phrase before, along the way? That's Deuteronomy 6, you know, teach your children along the way. And so when I heard that, I thought, that's who I am. And so I think it has to be part of who you are as a person in your marriage and your parenting. But I was that guy who's like, oh, I'm going to put the CD in and say, let's listen to music together. Shouldn't we all be that way?

Well, some are wired a little differently. No, the great thing is that you're a team with your different strengths. And so what your method is, I'll be the one that does the Bible memory verses with them. Great, that's your strength. And Guy is saying, here's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to have these conversations and I'm going to be the one in the moment to do that. That's tag team. That's why God gives kids two parents so that they can have the benefit of both of those. And if you do it the other way, like against your wiring, because we tried this. You know, she's like, I want a family altar.

I want Sunday nights. I'm like, okay. And I get up there and they're throwing things at me and it's just, you know. I have to say, it was interesting for me because, you know, I worked in the secular TV and film industry for 20 years before I met Amber. So I worked in an environment where I had to kind of hide my faith a little bit. I wasn't able to live it out loud other than the example of who I was and how I did business. And so I think that I learned a way of showing my faith in that way and I kind of protected myself.

And unfortunately, I'm still in that kind of position in some ways today. But Amber had a very different upbringing where her faith was lived out loud daily. Every week she'd stand up in front of her entire congregation and read these memorized verses, you know. And it was a daily part of her life.

Taught at a Christian school. That's what you talked about. Exactly. So I also kind of came into this relationship feeling a little less than because I knew that she's basically like a passionate biblical scholar.

And I'm a quiet guy who loves the Lord. Probably created some insecurity. Yeah.

No, it absolutely did. And we didn't talk about it, of course. And so it came out in her triggers by me not doing those things until one day I got a text message from her because she had read an article from. I'd read an article that just got me started thinking about this process of valuing your spouse and their unique qualities, which I hadn't really been doing. And to get this text from her saying, I value you as a spiritual leader in our family. And I know it's different than what I would like, but I really value what you bring to our kids. It was just afraid of my spirit. And she saw me. For me too, because I no longer had this monkey on my back where I was like wanting him to change and be this different thing.

And finally I could just like relax into enjoying and appreciating who he was. Here's what's so important about both of these issues we've talked about, because we've talked about messy houses. We've talked about passive spiritual leadership. What's important is to pull back and to go, what's going on inside of me? Why do I have these expectations? And I feel like my expectations are legitimate, but are they really? I mean, how legitimate are they really?

And are there adjustments I need to make? Whatever it is that's triggering you to have that perspective that says, I may not be right here. I may have issues in my own life that need to be dealt with. And let's come together. We're not the enemy of one another. Let's figure out how we can make the adjustments we need to make and live at peace with one another and help one another in the midst of this. That's at the heart of your book, Marriage Triggers.

Coaching us as couples to know how to respond when we are provoked, because we're all going to be provoked. We're making the book available this week to Family Life Today listeners. For those of you who are regular listeners, if you can help with the donation this week to support the ongoing work of this ministry, to help continue this radio program on your local radio station or as a podcast, however you're listening, however you receive it, you make this program possible for yourself and others every time you make a donation. And if you can make a donation today, we'd love to send you a guy in Amber Lea's book, Marriage Triggers, exchanging spouses' angry reactions for gentle biblical responses.

That's what we want, right? We want to respond biblically. We want to respond gently and kindly to one another.

So how do we cultivate that in our marriage? We'll send you a copy of Guy in Amber's book, Marriage Triggers, when you make a donation today to support Family Life Today. Go online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to make your donation and request your copy of the book. And keep in mind, your donations are really helping to build the marriages and families of so many people all around the world, hundreds of thousands of people every day who are receiving practical biblical help and hope thanks to your donations.

So you're really investing in the lives and marriages of others every time you make a donation. Thanks for your support of this ministry. Quick reminder, if you are in a blended marriage or you know somebody in a step family, A Week From Saturday is our blended and blessed one-day virtual event. You can still sign up to take part in this event, either as a couple or if you want to get a group together and go through the material together. All of the details are available on our website at familylifetoday.com. The blended and blessed one-day event, Saturday, April 24th. All of the information again is available online at familylifetoday.com. Sign up and join us for blended and blessed. Now tomorrow we're going to continue to look at those things that can provoke us to irritation or anger in marriage.

What do we do if we just feel like our spouse is not loving us the way we ought to be loved? We'll talk about that and other marriage triggers with Guy and Amber Leah again tomorrow. Hope you can be with us for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with help today from Bruce Goff and, of course, our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll 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. Help for today, hope for tomorrow.