Mudslinging and Marriage

Ask your spouse today, what would make this a good day for you? And I learned to ask that question because naturally, sinful guy, I wake up going, what would make this a good day for me?

And I have my whole little list, you know, da da da. But everybody in your house wakes up with, what would make this a good day for me? So I'm going to put my little what would make this a good day for me in a few hours, and then we'll focus on how I can help Tony make sure it's a good day for her. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson. And I'm Dave Wilson. And you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app.

This is Family Life Today. Okay, one of the things I don't think we realized when we got married is we're standing there in front of the pastor. I look perfect. You did look perfect. With my hair combed over, my bang. And anyway, you know, it was just this great moment.

Magical day. If we could have seen behind the veil, there were bags of luggage that were attached to us as we came to this marriage, right? We had no idea how much we were actually bringing into our marriage of past hurt. You brought a lot more baggage than I did. I probably did, honestly. And you had your share as well.

But actually, the truth is, is I brought a ton. Yeah, and I don't think any of us are aware of the impact that baggage from the past will affect our marriage in the present. Because nobody's thinking on their wedding day, I bet this won't work.

I bet we'll be miserable in a few years. I expect there's a divorce in our future. But also, nobody realizes, I don't think, on their wedding day how hard it's going to be.

Yeah. And one of the best things we ever did, we didn't even know how vital it would be at the time, is two weeks before our wedding, we went to the Weekend to Remember, Family Life's Weekend to Remember. And it was the light bulb to say, oh my goodness, this is going to be hard, but we have a plan. And I got to tell you something, this is a conference you can't miss. It's called the Family Life Weekend to Remember. We took COVID off.

We couldn't meet because of social distancing, but it's back. And not only can you go, you can go half price right now. Which is amazing.

Yeah. You can go half right now, you can go half price, you can pick the getaway, you can pick the city you want to go to. And trust me, between Friday night and Sunday morning, you are going to get a plan that's going to be one of the best things you've ever done for your marriage.

And this is for pre-marriage, couples married five years, 50 years, you name it, it will help anybody. So here's how you do it. Go to familylifetoday.com and sign up for a Weekend to Remember. Yeah. And so we've got a couple with us today that I just love. Tony and Carrie Newhoff are joining us.

Tony just released a book not too long ago called Before You Split. Which is interesting because, well, first of all, let me just say welcome to Family Life, guys. Glad to have you on with us. Hey, it's just so great to be with you. I'm thrilled to be here. Love being with you guys. Thank you.

Yeah. And I tell you, when I saw your book, two things, one, I know Carrie, and so I know a little bit of your story, but I didn't know half of it until I started reading the book. But it's such a unique perspective because you're a divorce mediator. You've sat with couples. You know... Tony is. You know, Tony, you know the consequences. You know how it goes with family. So you have that perspective.

So you can bring all that into it as well. But you're married to a leader, a podcaster, a former pastor, I mean, a guy I listened to. Carrie, I read your blog every single day. It's life changing. It's powerful. I've pointed more people to your resources in your books because they're just dynamite.

It's so, so good. And he really, you really have impacted so many. And interesting, you both have your law degrees. It's where we met. Law school.

Oh, it is. Where did you go to law school? Osgoode Hall. Yeah, Osgoode Hall, Toronto. In Toronto.

They divide you. Like, usually you're just in there with hundreds of other strangers at law school. And we were put in the same section, Section D, and I noticed this really cute blonde girl in Section D and pretty much stared at you for two months until we started dating. Yeah. My friend said, Tony, that boy keeps staring at you. Seriously? It was that apparent? Come on, Carrie. You got to be undercover a little bit.

Yeah. I was kind of smitten. It was one of those things where it was love at first sight or lust at first sight perhaps.

But anyway, we became friends and a couple months later we started dating and that's another thing too. We did not have a long dating period, not a long courtship, if you want to use that word. So from meeting to being engaged was nine months and then from meeting to being married was 18 months. And 18 months after we were married, we had our first son and all of that happened while we were in law school trying to graduate.

It was a bit of a zooey time. We've been empty nesters for five, six years. Now we feel like we're dating. It's like, oh, a lot of couples, they discovered this part before they got married. We didn't quite marry strangers, but it was close. And you're right. We brought all of our unresolved baggage into that relationship.

Yeah. You call it in the book, if I'm right, you call it mud or mud stories that you bring in. So talk about that a little bit because I'm guessing you didn't realize the mud you were bringing in. What was the mud you were bringing into your marriage?

Oh, there was plenty of it. Mary and I got together, as we said, when we were in law school and I became a Christian just shortly before that and without a lot of mentoring or insight. And so it wasn't until several years into our marriage that I started to pick up clues that something wasn't quite right. At one point we were on vacation with our oldest son and I had this episode where I just broke down and started weeping and really didn't know why. There wasn't any major factor provocation and it was probably about 36 hours of misery. And then I sort of pulled myself back together and we went home and at that point I realized I had a choice. I could either pay attention to what happened or just completely ignore it and life goes on. But at that point I started to pay more attention to these emotions that seemed to go beyond the circumstances. I call them overkill emotions where maybe Carrie said something that was provocative, maybe at a level of two or three out of 10, but my response is a seven or a nine.

Something's going on with that. And it took some introspection, prayer, reading scripture was part of this discovery process and working with a Christian counselor to realize that there were these hidden lies that were beneath the surface. Certainly I wasn't aware of them that were telling me things like, I'm better off alone. And that showed up in the ways I was acting and behaving that were very self-protective. It became obvious over time that I didn't trust anyone. That's how it manifested in my life. It was part of my withdrawing from conflict that I talked about the first time we had a conversation. And that wasn't the only one I've also come to realize that I was believing things like my voice doesn't matter and I deserve to be invisible. And I think that I've heard other people talk about having these hidden or self-limiting lies or beliefs where they believe things like I'm not good enough, I'll never have what it takes. And so, yeah, that's what I'm calling mud, but you could also call it wounds or baggage. I think it's such a common phenomenon, but earlier in life, in the early years, in my twenties, I had no idea that I had dragged those kinds of beliefs into my marriage and into my life.

Yeah. And I think, you know, you tell me if it's true in your marriage, I found that it's really easy for me to see the mud in hand, you know, I could see all her baggage. I had a really hard time seeing mine, even when she would point it out, which is, you know, her gift to me. She said to me one day, I am God's Holy Spirit to your life. I never said that. I said, I'm your helper. She said I'm the Holy Spirit. I'm the Holy Spirit. That's what I said. I helped the Holy Spirit.

It doesn't feel like help to me, right? That's what he said. So the question would be, you know, how do you see your own mud?

Because it is easier to see somebody else's, but to look in the mirror and identify it. Oh, I saw Tony's like crazy. Yeah. Right. Like, and that was the thing. You are very happy because you are rarely in conflict with yourself, particularly in your 20s.

Right. I got my own way all the time. And the other thing I think you're dealing with is, you know, if you come from your family of origin and you know, we have different families of origin, but they weren't too dissimilar, but like everything is normal to you. And as an adult, you begin to realize, oh, that isn't normal, normal. That was just normal to me. So really trivial example, I remember like my mom would always wipe the ketchup lid bottle.

So you know, if you've got a bottle of ketchup, you have the lid, if there's ketchup on it and it kind of squirted out, she would clean it. Of course. Yes. Of course. Exactly.

Maybe I was a little more, a little more obsessed about that than perhaps Tony was. And I'm like, well, that's just like normal. That's what people do.

And you know, that is such a trivial and stupid example. But I think your life is that way. Like, of course, this is when we go to bed. This is when we get up. This is when we do this. And when we do that. And some of that is your own preferences. Some of that's family of origin.

And how do we get that? Yeah. I spent a long time and I did the same thing. I went to counseling because Tony was speaking like the Holy Spirit and gave me an ultimatum and basically said, you go to counseling or this isn't going to end well. So when I was about 31, I got married when I was 25, when I was 31, I went to counseling and I spent the first hour of counseling complaining about Tony and just, she does this and she does this and she doesn't do this. And I'm so frustrated and, you know, can you please validate me and correct her? And then, you know, my counselor, his name was Jim.

He just said to me, well, Carrie, now that we're done talking about Tony, can we talk about you? And that's when I began to realize and start to unpack that somewhere along the line when I was a kid, I confused love with performance. And that basically, if I behaved well and I produced good results, it forgave pretty much everything. And of course, that's not biblical.

That's not how people respond. I've also realized, and I'm still working on this, I have a fear of intimacy. That I am not good with really, really close relationships. Now we moved a lot when I was a kid. Maybe that was part of it. I remember being 10 years old and it was four schools in three years and I made a decision that I wasn't going to make any more friends and dumb thing, but that's what 10 year olds do. Well, it turns out that we didn't move a lot after that. And all those people could have been my friends, but by that time the wall was up. Well, put that in a marriage context.

And that doesn't go very well when you're afraid of the person who is closest to you. And I wasn't like afraid, afraid of Tony, but you know, there was like, I'm only going so far and yeah, so I had those issues. And then my obsession with like OCD and environment and order got really out of whack. And you know, to me that was normal and self-evident.

You know, you never buy an addition of worse homes and gardens. So I would basically, you know, if I was frustrated with us, I would just go mow the lawn for the third time that week. And that was my way of just coping with the stress and the chaos, or I'd go wash the car or organize something because that was chaos. Now that turns out that can be very healthy.

I still like a nice cut lawn and a clean car, but it's no longer a thorn in our relationship and it's not a substitute for intimacy or not being able to unpack our conflict and deal with it in a healthy way. Hey, let me ask this, Tony. So how did you deal with what Kerry just said there's pretty deep about, I had a fear of intimacy. And I guess I'm probably saying that because I have the same fear. We talked about it on Kerry's podcast actually. When we were talking about our vertical marriage, one of my sons said to me, dad, you're more intimate with the congregation and from the stage than you are with us in the home.

So you'll share a vulnerability to a thousand people and you're afraid to go there. And of course he was a hundred percent right. I was like, as soon as he said it, I'm like, oh my goodness.

So my wife's had to live with that for 40, 41 years. Which was interesting. Like we would go out and Dave is probably a better communicator than I am in terms of he uses more words, he's more animated and he also goes into detail about work. And so he's, you know, telling me these great stories and then this happened and then this guy said this at work. And so I'm listening, like shaking my head and like, Hey, yes. So like, how are you doing?

And like, how do you think we're doing? And there's silence. I shut down. Totally shut down because he felt like, oh no, one, I don't think you knew.

I didn't know. And you were afraid to be in trouble too, like, oh, what is she wanting? So he's trying to think of what I'm wanting to hear.

What am I in trouble for now? She wants me to be intimate, whatever that is. And so, I mean, I just want to know, how did you deal with that in your marriage? Because Carrie just admitted a similar thing. Was that a struggle? Did that change?

What'd that look like? I think that's part of what we needed to go to counseling for. Carrie's tendency to fear intimacy and mine to not trust anyone. I realized that my trust issues went deep enough to not even trusting God. You know, I started to realize that, okay, in my brain, I absolutely want to follow Christ.

I'm a hundred percent sold on being a Christ follower and being surrendered. But in my heart, nothing resonates, like nothing penetrates. And I started asking questions like, well, God, here I am following you, but where's the love? Where's the joy?

Where's the peace? Like this emotional journey wasn't... Did you say you struggle with intimacy too? Well, yeah, that was my part of the struggle with intimacy. So we were a fine pair.

Two emotional toddlers. It's like, great. Yeah. How do you do a relationship with that? And I think, you know, for me, just being open about it, it's a question of feeling not judged, feeling accepted, feeling safe.

And that's something I'm still working on. And you know, it's funny because I'm the same way. Like people would say, if you follow my leadership stuff, it's like, wow, Kerry's very transparent. He's very open.

He's very real. And that's true. And you would also get that at my house for dinner if you were over and we were hanging out. But I think there are layers to intimacy. And I would say for me, you know me better than anybody and you see me.

And then it's Keller's understanding of the gospel, that the gospel is to be fully known and fully loved. And so what normally happens is you say, well, I want you to fully love me so you can't fully know me. Because if you knew this about me, then you wouldn't love me.

So you just hide yourself. And so I've had to learn and Tony's been the best teacher and we've gotten, I think, good at accepting each other. And then being a leader, I was always trying to fix my wife, right? I fix problems all day long. And so I'm going to fix you.

And that is not a good strategy. Terrible. Apparently, as you've told me many times, you do not need fixing, is that true? I think that's the Holy Spirit's job. Well, wait, I thought you were the Holy Spirit, Anne. I'm his helper.

Oh, you're his helper. Okay. Well, one of the things, Tony, you said in the book, which I thought was very insightful, was when you step into your unprocessed wounds or your mud or your baggage or whatever you bring in, when you started to do that, you started to realize I can no longer, or you said, I don't blame Carrie now for my unhappiness. Talk about that, because that's a big insight, because that's what we do. We blame our unhappiness on our spouse or our marriage, but you discovered something that's life changing, I think.

Yeah. It was through that process of prayer and really opening myself up to Jesus in the way of David describes in Psalm 139, when he says, Lord, see if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting, I needed to take ownership, really. I did have that blaming perspective where if only you would stop being so upset about the state of the kitchen or so focused on the environment, and if you would step up as a co-parent and pay more attention to us instead, then things would be so much better. I was experiencing really dark moods at that point and exhaustion, and I really was focused on Carrie as the cause for those emotions. But over time, as I prayed about it, as I listened to what my Christian counselor had to say, I started to recognize that no, there were layers to what was going on, and I was completely emotionally unprepared for marriage.

I needed insight into how I managed my own emotions, let alone responded to or handled emotions of other people. And another layer to my exhaustion was just being isolated. Since I had that underlying belief that I'm better off alone, I really had been functioning as if I was an island, as if I was the only one who would forge ahead and take control of my life. And I wasn't really being open or vulnerable with the friends that I had around me. I had friends, I was hanging out with people, with other mothers, we would get together with our kids. I had friendships, but I wasn't really talking about what was happening in my heart, in my life, in our marriage, and keeping those things to myself meant that, functionally, I was isolated. I had to come around and reach the point where I saw that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that God's essence is community, and none of us as followers, as children of God, are intended to be isolated.

So I swung around to the view where I could see that my emotional problems, my exhaustion was very much a part of how I was living my life, not what Carrie was doing in our marriage. And I had to reach the point where I actually believe that I need to rely on God and others to be fully alive, that it's actually a necessity. It's like the air I breathe, it's part of being a child of God, means that we have to have these relationships that are open, vulnerable, transparent, and interreliant. I think that's really big, and I think a lot of us have been there and are maybe there right now, where you fall into this black hole of feeling, I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy to be seen or heard, I'm alone. And the enemy of our soul, Satan, that's exactly where he wants us to be, isolated in our own heads.

The longer you're in your head alone, the darker it can be. I remember speaking one time, I'm trying to hide in shame, I get done speaking and I'm thinking, that was awful. And then I'm hit with this barrage of these lies in my head of, that was terrible, you're unworthy, you're not good enough. And this is all again, baggage and mud from the past that's now being slung into my mind. This is from her family of origin as well. Yes.

And so it's very performance oriented. And so if I don't feel like I'm at a 10, I'm a failure because I'm supposed to be the best. And as a result of that, I'm in total isolation for like four days. I won't even answer the phone and I'm a mom, my kids are home, but I'm not worthy enough to even be around my friends because I don't want to talk about it.

It's embarrassing. So sure enough, I have a friend that just keeps calling and I'm thinking, stop calling me. And then she comes to my door and she's knocking on the door saying, I know you're hiding in shame. You need to come out of the house.

You need to open this door and let me talk to you. And so I did like, oh my goodness, you're so irritating. And she made me sit down.

She said, I want to hear everything that you're thinking right now. And when we bring those lies, those ugly lies into the light with our spouse, with a friend, it's freeing, isn't it? And when you hear what you've been thinking, it is so the enemy, the accuser of the brethren who only seeks to kill, steal and destroy every our lives, our marriages, our families. And so when I hear that, Tony, like, oh man, look at you. You got set free, you know, and God, and it doesn't always happen overnight, does it? It takes a while.

No. But what a good friend. In a sense, it's the, and I guess I'm sort of quoting Keller here as well in the meaning of marriage, but one of the things he brings out is the purpose of marriage is to help us become like, he calls it our glory selves. You know, when we'll be like Christ in Christ's presence, it's like we're on this journey to get there. We're never going to get there on planet earth, but we will one day and he gives us a spouse who speaks life, identifies the mud. We can't clean it up, but we can speak it into our spouse. And if we receive it, we're going to be sharpened to become more like Christ.

If we reject it, we're stuck, we're dirty, we're muddy, we're not going to get into there. So how did that process happen in your marriage? Did God use each other? How did you stop being mud slingers? Well, some of that was definitely the counseling journey for both of us.

We did couples counseling and then individual therapy. And I think we both, the light bulb went on at different times, maybe a little bit earlier for me that I had to take responsibility for my role in the marriage and stop throwing mud at Tony or blaming her for everything. And I realized, wow, I really am kind of messed up. And actually, ironically, you know, that made me, first of all, the most important thing is what happens here in the home. So at the end of the day, I'm a follower of Jesus. I'm a husband and I'm a father. Those are my most important roles. And as I got that right, ironically, I became a better leader. Like I'm not the perfect boss, but I'm a better boss.

Like it just has a spillover effect because I agreed with Tony. Like there were times where we, you know, opened up a new building. And I remember you were on the front row crying, not tears of joy, but tears of how miserable our life is and what this cost me. And now we've been to other buildings we've opened and other moments. And like when there are tears, there are tears of joy and agreement.

And that is such a joy. So I think a lot of self-examination, a lot of prayer, a lot of confession. And even when I get worked up in the moment, I'm like, okay, what did I bring to this? And sometimes I'm like about 1%, like even now, you know, if we get into a moment, I'd be like, what did I bring to this? I'm like, well, not much.

It's all her fault. And you're probably thinking the same thing, but I think we have the awareness to know now, wait a minute, I'm probably somewhere between 30 and 70% of this problem. So let me try to figure out what part do I own. Okay. It was my tone of voice. Okay. It was, I made unreasonable demands. Oh, okay. I, I expect too much.

So I'm at any Grammy. She's a five, you know, Ian Morgan Cron says, we wake up with 200% battery life in us every day. And you would say you wake up with 70% battery life or 80 or whatever. And so I can often be like, and we'll do this and we'll do this and we'll do this and we'll do this. Like this weekend, I'm painting the entire garage. And Tony looks at that and goes, that's how you're spending your, your spare time.

Yeah. What about your Sabbath? Come and help me. Come and help me.

It's I'm spending my Sabbath. What's your point? So, but it's, it's now I can laugh at that. Whereas before that would have been a, well, you just got to drop what you're doing and help me. You owe me.

Tony owes me nothing. I'm going to do that. If she wants to help, she can help. Yeah. There were a couple of key things that I learned from Andy Stanley. And one of them was around expectations. You know, what, what do you expect from your spouse?

Really? The answer is, is nothing. You don't expect anything from your spouse, but you share each other's desires and you operate from a position of trying to satisfy each other's desires as opposed to trying to jump through a hoop that your spouse holds up. I think the other thing that really stood out to me at the time was a message that Andy preached about pride versus humility. And I believe he based it on first Peter five, where Peter says, all of you clothe yourselves with humility for God opposes the proud, but shows favor to the humble. And when I heard that message, the part about God opposing the proud really struck me in the sense that I really honestly want God's favor and help.

I do not want to set God up as my opponent. So it made me look more seriously at any ways that I was resisting the work of the Holy Spirit or responding in ways that were full of pride and just taking a deeper look at surrender. If I can add one real practical tip, it would be this, ask your spouse today, what would make this a good day for you? And I learned to ask that question because naturally sinful guy, I wake up going, what would make this a good day for me? And I have my whole little list, you know, that, but everybody in your house wakes up with a, what would make this a good day for me?

So if you just like this weekend, I know I'm not going to be painting all day, but I know that probably it's going to be getting out on the trail, doing a hike, maybe getting out on our bikes, maybe socializing a little bit. So I'm going to put my little, what would make this a good day for me in a few hours, and then we'll focus on how I can help Tony make sure it's a good day for her. And that's a direct application of love your wife as Christ loved the church. It's a laying down of your agenda. I say, it's not about me. It's about her.

It's about him. I'm going to, I'm going to serve unto Christ, not for my happiness, really for theirs. And that's a beautiful way to do life, beautiful way to do marriage. Really what's at the core of what Tony and Carrie Newhoff have been sharing today is what would make this a great day for us, for our marriage, and ultimately what would make this a day that God is pleased with. That has to be the focus as we think about our marriage. It can't just be, am I getting what I want out of this marriage?

It has to be something bigger, something more purposeful and intentional. And I think a lot of couples get stuck in the cycle of thinking, am I happy rather than asking the question, is my spouse happy and is God happy with our marriage? Tony Newhoff has written a book called Before You Split, and it's a book that really every couple who is at a point of hopelessness in your marriage, this is a book you ought to pick up and read and really work your way through and ask yourself the question, have I done everything I can do to try to preserve my marriage relationship? Am I getting the help I need?

Am I leaning into friends who can help me here? Oftentimes when couples find themselves in a tough spot in their marriage, they isolate, they go dark, they don't reach out to anybody else, and that's the exact wrong time to be doing that. Tony talks about that and provides other wisdom in the book Before You Split, which is a book we have available in our Family Life Today Resource Center. You can get it online at familylifetoday.com, or you can call to order 1-800-FL-TODAY is the number. Again, the book is called Before You Split, find out what you really want for the future of your marriage by Tony Newhoff.

Order online at familylifetoday.com, or call to order at 1-800-358-6329, that's 1-800, F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. Let me also say if you're looking for a way to clean up some of the messiness in your marriage, you've got a good marriage, but all of us have those irritations, those messy spots, we brought our own mud stories as we heard about today into our marriage, and you'd like someone who could help you take a good marriage and make it better, or take a hurting marriage and bring hope, plan to join us this fall at one of our 30 Weekend to Remember Marriage Getaways that we're hosting in cities all across the country. The Getaway is a two and a half day escape for couples where you're going to learn what God's word has to say about how to build a strong, fulfilling, enduring marriage relationship, and right now when you sign up, you'll save 50% off the regular registration fee for an upcoming Getaway. That offer is good to Family Life Today listeners, and it's good only through Monday, so if you want the 50% savings, and if you're ready to join us this fall at a Getaway, go to our website, familylifetoday.com.

Information about the Getaway is available there, you can find a location and a weekend that works for you, and then register online, or call 1-800-FL today if you have any questions or you'd like to register by phone. Either way, plan to join us at an upcoming Weekend to Remember Marriage Getaway. We look forward to seeing you. Now tomorrow, we'll hear from Tony Newhoff how you process the decision in front of you when your marriage is in a crisis situation. The decision to either split or to just stay and survive or to save your marriage.

How do you make that decision and what do you do once you've decided? Hope you can tune in and be with us tomorrow. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapeen, we'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.