How to Turn Your Spouse’s Criticism Constructive: Paul Miller

All right, so I was thinking just now, I think I know what you're going to say, but if I asked you, what was your biggest surprise about marriage?

Specifically, our marriage. Biggest surprise? I think my biggest surprise was you. Was me? Yeah. No way. This is not what I thought I would get for an answer.

Really? 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 the Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. What was your biggest surprise about marriage?

Our marriage? I think I was surprised of how my feelings could go so up and down, but to be truthful, I had expectations of what you would be like and how you would treat me. And I just let you down. I was surprised by it. Let's just say it like that. That's a nice way to say it. Yeah, I was thinking just now, I was thinking my surprise would be, I was surprised at how awesome and wonderful and great it can be, and I was surprised at how hard and agonizing it can be to be in a committed marriage love relationship. I don't think- It's both sides. I don't think I realized that there would be the hard because we loved each other so much and we love Jesus so much.

That's what I was surprised about. Yeah. It doesn't have to be that hard. And we're going to talk about how love can be awesome and wonderful and beautiful and also sometimes hard with Paul Miller, who is back in the Family Life studios. It's been a while since Paul's been with us, but Paul, welcome back to Family Life. Thank you. It's good to be here again.

I don't know when it was you were here last time. I know we talked about your book, The J Curve. Yeah. And your ministry is See Jesus? Yes, that's right.

And tell us what that means. SeeJesus.net, I know is where we can find you. Well, we actually got the name out of the Bible when- Well, there you go. The Greeks come to one of Jesus' disciples and they say, we want to see Jesus. And it's really been the passion of my life for 30 years is just to see the beauty of Jesus. In fact, that used to be our mission slogan was helping people see the beauty of Jesus. And people had no idea what our ministry was. Like, do we sell artwork? What were we doing? Were we a beauty parlor?

You know, but it's really seeing his beauty, which is just inseparable from understanding how to love. Yeah. So you're in, you've always been in Philadelphia? No, I grew up in California and used to spend my summers in Southwest Oregon. My dad was a church planting pastor out there.

And so we lived in San Francisco and also in the San Joaquin Valley. And Paul, tell us about your family. Well, we have six children. Our fourth child, Kim, is disabled. The other five are married and all of them have three children. So we have 15 grandchildren. And I've asked Kim if she wants to get married.

She's our fourth daughter who lives with us with disabilities. And Kim has consistently said, no, because it's too noisy. And everybody, yeah, I mean, it's noisy. That'd be a surprise about marriage.

Kids and grandkids are noisy. She's sort of thinking through. She thinks of her nieces and nephews like maybe wine. Like they're best on the shelf for a few years until they quiet down.

Or cheese. That's a good perspective. That is good. That's how you talk about love and our definition of love when we say, oh, I love you or I love this. You've studied love. You've defined love and you've looked at the author of love, which is Jesus. Are we skewed in our view of love even in our marriages and relationships?

Yes. And I would say at several levels, one of the most obvious is that people misunderstand love as a feeling. And it has huge feeling components to it. But we tend to sit on the happy feelings that you often experience when you're falling in love, which is great. But there's also sadness and anger and all kinds. I mean, there's a kaleidoscope of feelings when it comes to love.

And that confuses people. And also, because love, the beautiful thing about intimacy is when it's mutual. And so they come into marriage and their expectations are really high.

You're describing me. This is good. Which are good, but the work of intimacy is they're simply not prepared for it. And they're hunting for balance and they're hunting for evenness. And love is not balanced.

Why didn't anyone ever tell us this? Well, that's why we're doing this program right now. There's somebody listening, especially a pre-married or any married couple.

This is going to be really, really helpful. We're going to dive in a little bit to your book, A Loving Life, the subtitle in a world of broken relationships. Relationships are broken. And so the love in this broken world is something we need to learn how to do. Like you said, it's not just I feel. I need to learn how to love.

So Paul, coach us. In our culture, we feel like if my feelings are continually disappointment, anger, I feel like I'm not in love, we assume it's because we've married the wrong person. Right. And you're saying, no, those feelings are normal. By the way, we both thought that early in our marriage. We married the wrong person, you know, because we felt all those things. And you're not supposed to feel those if you're really in love.

Yeah. That is one of the dominant moods of our culture. And it's not just in marriage. People feel that with their work, with their relationships. So they're checking themselves.

How am I feeling about this? And if they're not feeling good, then they will either pull back. I mean, I've had two or three people mention, just in the last month, of someone in a family relationship outside of our family where they had said, I need space from that relationship. It no longer felt safe.

I mean, you can't get more modern than that. And again, you know, that needs qualifying. Sometimes you do need space. And sometimes relationships aren't safe. But it's like the master narrative. It's kind of the quest. And the quest is for this soul that is unruffled by life. And that deeper quest is you think that your soul will be fulfilled in marriage when, in fact, your soul gets exposed in marriage.

Oh, that's it right there. Our soul gets exposed in marriage. Because a lot of people don't think that's the reality that they want in marriage. You know, I don't want my soul exposed. But that's a beautiful thing, even though it's agonizing.

What do you think that means? As you know, we have, you know, two sinners are coming together that are truly, you know, let's give them a good start, who are truly in love with one another but unaware of their dark side, what Scripture calls the flesh. And what you begin to do, I would say the modern method of intimacy is, you know, as you begin to see your spouse's flesh, you think, okay, if I just point out to them their flesh, then I'll feel better about, then they'll love me and we can be intimate. And if they don't notice what I'm saying, then I'm going to repeat it. And so, you know, I call it intimacy through criticism. That's what I did for years, thinking, oh, he surely doesn't see it.

Let me point it out. Right, yeah. And what better thing would, you know, your spouse want?

Motivate him. I thought he would say thank you. Oh, thank you. I never realized.

Yes. And you would think after six months of it not working, they would stop and try a different tactic, but we just double down. Yeah, well, I love couples that have been married for 40 years and they're still picking away at one another. And, you know, a couple times I've just said, you know, let's just think about how many times you've said that critical comment to your spouse.

And, you know, you can easily get up to a number of five to ten thousand, you know, as it works. It doesn't seem like it's working. Maybe you want to try a different strategy like prayer or just being quiet or what Jesus does at Gethsemane and says, I take this cup. Or maybe they're never going to change and that God wants to use this to draw you into the humility of Christ.

Paul, I just have to stop for a second and say, my sisters, my friends, are you hearing that? Because as a woman, I really thought my criticism and my, I didn't even think it was criticism. I thought my words were helpful. I thought I was helping Dave and trying to motivate him to change.

And then I did double down. I thought he surely isn't hearing me because he's not responding, so maybe he's not hearing me. Paul, it had the opposite effect.

All he wanted to do is pull away. And so I love that you're saying just take a second. It's not working. It's not. It's not working. Has it worked?

It has not worked and it doesn't work. But I do see it changes marriages because I know that Dave really did start pulling away from me. And I continually blamed him just to take a second and to look at myself, to take a second to pray like, Lord, how should I change this? That's just wise counsel from you.

And let me flip it though. It is God's principle chosen physical path to make men great though. Because if, as a husband, you can be attentive to your wife's corrections and work at it, it is a way to greatness for men. And as you begin to develop new habits, and that was one of the things that happened early on in our marriage, just as my wife began to poke away at my character and after getting through the first recoils, it began to make me a better person.

It's that kind of chiseling of manhood. In Western civilization, and Western civilization is not any better than any other culture, I'm not saying that, but it has been deeply imprinted by the gospel and Jesus where there's this call within marriage to not seek fulfillment outside of marriage, but to be solely focused on your spouse is these are the cultures that have developed strong women like the Hebrew women. And strong women make strong men. So I'm just giving the flip side of that. I think what I ended up doing is I stopped criticizing so much. And then when I needed to speak the truth after I had prayed about it, I did say something to Dave and then he could receive it because I wasn't a constant, belligerent voice of critique in his head. It was once in a while I'd say, hey, I'm seeing this.

And that was probably more helpful. In our story, and every marriage is different, and we've shared this many times here, so listeners have heard this, but she flipped the script and started calling out the good in me. And at first I thought she was just lying because she was more critiquing. And then she started saying, you're a good man and a good husband, and I see these things. Over time, I felt loved and respected by her. And then when she had a hard truth like, hey, I have something to say, I was more apt to receive it because I felt like, wow, she really believes in me.

She loves me. And then as I was studying the Word and teaching on marriage, we realized that's part of God's design for Christian marriage is that a husband and wife will sharpen one another, like you said, to become what? Like Christ.

That's the goal. And so one of the greatest gifts we receive from God is our spouse, who sees more than anybody else is ever going to see. And when they speak something, we can get defensive and we can say, I don't want to hear that, or we can go, this is a gift.

God wants me to work on this area. Thank you for this woman, this man who's calling this out. But what we typically do is push them away. I don't want this.

I don't feel like I'm in love anymore. And we go looking for somebody else who's going to be nice for a while, and then they're going to do the same thing as well, right? Is that sort of a description of what?

Yeah, yeah, very much so. I actually like to kind of flip what Jesus hears from his heavenly father on several occasions from the heavens, where Jesus hears, this is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased. And what the husband or wife will hear when they get a barrage of criticism is the flip of that. You are my unworthy husband with whom I am displeased.

Or you are my unworthy wife with whom I am displeased. And when that gets down to become a narrative, it can be either side, when that becomes a narrative in the soul, and the soul already bends that way towards guilt and shame, then everything is shaped kind of above the waterline by that narrative of what they're saying to you. And that's why it's so, so important to nourish in your heart a sense of the love of God for you, which is the gospel, so that you're hearing the same narrative in your soul that Jesus hears.

So you know that God's pleasure with you is infinite because the blood of Jesus is infinite and that God is for me. So then I can actually hear the criticism. And that actually gives me the courage, whether you're a husband or a wife, to speak to a critical spirit. Because what happens when you speak to someone who is a critical spirit in any relationship, but particularly in marriage, you get more criticism.

How did you do that? Speak to a critical spirit? For me, stage one was being attentive to the criticism. But then at some point after that, that I began to really learn and soaked in the gospel. I studied the gospel, just for me, just resting in God's love for me.

I knew my soul was disoriented at its core level, and I needed to learn again. And what I'm talking about is feeding faith in your soul, that core faith that God is for me. So if God is for me, then I don't have to hear an internal narrative of you are my unworthy husband, or you are my unworthy wife. So that I can listen to criticism, I can take it seriously, I can be gentle in my response, and maybe as part of that, as a ministry to my wife, I can speak honestly to her about having a critical spirit. What would that sound like, to speak honestly to her about a critical spirit? Honey, do you know you've reminded me about this five times today? Just a sentence, you know what I mean? A gentle answer turns away wrath. I like how you're saying it gently, because I've said that screaming, that it doesn't go as well. You know you told me that five times today? It just causes more criticism.

Yeah, so waiting, I'm praying for a time. And I've also learned that there's no perfect time, because then you might be criticized for, oh, your timing's bad, how you said is bad. So if there's criticism of how I shared the criticism, that, by the way, the gentleness in the way I say that came because my wife was critical of how I was critical about her criticism.

Never been there before, yeah. So what do I have to do? How do I keep that from getting into be a quarrel when she's critical about my criticism of her critical spirit, okay? How do you keep that from getting? Because you're right on the edge of a quarrel at this point. You listen to her.

I go lower. I say, well, how could I have done that? You know, how should I have said that differently?

Go soft. It's humility is the key to all that. And you can only get that from Jesus. Yeah, Paul, I was thinking when you were talking about receiving the love of God for ourselves, you know, even your book title, A Loving Life, starts with being loved, right?

Yeah. But when you were saying that just a minute ago, I thought that requires, in my mind, you tell me right or wrong, two things. Confidence in God's love for me and humility. Because when somebody critiques you, a prideful, arrogant person gets defensive. A humble person knows this is a gift.

Even though it's hard, I'm receiving something I need to hear, but I won't receive it if I'm not confident in I am a loved, beloved son, daughter of the king. Is that true? That is very true. And part of me thinks that is the root of all of our issues, probably not all, but most of our issues in marriage or in life. I don't truly believe that. And you were talking earlier, you have just saturated yourself.

Is that how a person gets there? In the gospel. The last phrase I coined was preach the gospel to yourself. I need to speak it to me.

I need to hear God's love for me. What that does, it frees me to hear criticism. It frees me from my flushes wanting to react to that criticism. It frees me when I feel the anger welling up in my spirit to wait and pray. I pray every day that I would be, see I'm going to get it right, that I would be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger.

James. So I can, I've written three books on love. I need to pray that every day. So it's not like I've graduated beyond this, because my flesh is omnipresent until I go to be with Jesus. And knowing that allows me to say, I need Jesus to help me today to love. I don't outgrow my need for the spirit of Jesus to be in me and possess me. What you just said, Paul, I think we've all done this, I can remember preaching a sermon three or four times on a weekend about this very thing. And your spouse or someone speaks truth to you in love, Ephesians 4.15. It's a gift from God. It's to mold you to become like Christ.

Receive it. Don't get defensive. And then literally walked home two hours later and points out something, and everything in me, it just happened last week.

I won't get into it. It's like, you know, when we're out sometimes with people, you do this too much. And I'm like, and you know what? I knew when she said it. She's 100% right. I know I could feel it even when it was happening. I was talking too much, and she points that out. And everything in me is still like, yeah, but it's like what you just said. It's like, God, I need your Holy Spirit right here, right now, because my sin nature, my selfishness is rising up to defend myself against a gift. She's telling me something I need to hear and I need to listen to.

I've just preached and told other people to do it, and I'm struggling to do it. Have you ever been there? I've been there so much. That was the last thing we did together was on the J-curve, which has really been part of my life for about 30 years.

So as my wife comes to me, and if she says it badly, I don't have to critique her in the moment for how she's saying it. I can actually focus on her heart and her meaning. And the only way I can do that is to go, think of the letter J, going down into death is the path of Jesus. He goes down into death and up into resurrection. And instead of grasping at resurrection, I go down into the death that God has in front of me. And it's a little mini death right at that point. And I can take that death, even in that moment, knowing that how to receive my wife, what she's saying, is a path helps me. And that path, if you do it a lot, develops ruts in your life.

Yeah, that's a good word because we want to skip the down. We want to jump to resurrection. I mean, I think of Paul even, I think it's Philippians 3, 10, saying...

I want to know Christ and the fellowship of sharing in His suffering, becoming like Him in His death. And the power of His resurrection. And then the power of resurrection comes out of that. But I don't begin with resurrection. I begin with death. And maybe the resurrection is just me being attentive to my wife, even if she does it badly, and taking her seriously and not dismissing that.

And Jesus always meets me in the death because my will gets snapped. You're listening to Dave and Anne Wilson with Paul Miller on Family Life Today. Anne's going to share what stuck out to her from today's conversation in just a minute. But first, Paul has written a book called A Loving Life in a World of Broken Relationships. You can pick up a copy at familylifetoday.com, or you can give us a call at 800-358-6329.

That's 800, F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. You know, later this week, we're going to be joined by author Philip Yancey. His book is called Where the Light Fell. It's a memoir that he's written that we'd love to send you a copy as our thanks when you partner financially with Family Life. You'll help more families hear conversations just like the one you heard today, conversations that point to the hope found in Jesus Christ.

You can give at familylifetoday.com, or again by calling at 800-358-6329. That's 800, F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. What time are you spending with your spouse? And what could your family look like if you spent intentional time this year pursuing the people you love the most?

That answer could be inspiring, or it could be eye-opening. One year, 500 hours, a lifetime of impact. Family Life has developed a resource called 500 Hours Together.

It's a one-year marriage challenge. We'd love for you to check it out and learn more. You can find our link in the show notes at familylifetoday.com. All right, here's Anne with what stuck out to her the most from today's conversation. Whenever I'm around you, when we were with you the last time, Paul, it's obvious that you sit at the feet of Jesus.

Because you don't have those responses, I wrote down what you said. I have become attentive to criticism. I'm like, wow, most of us run so quickly away from criticism. But because you spent so much time with Jesus, you know who he calls you, you know that he loves you, you know that.

That you can be attentive even to criticism because you know that you're a son of the Most High God. Okay, if we're being honest, we've all had a boss or someone who we just couldn't stand, right? Are you guilty of that? I definitely am. Well, tomorrow on Family Life Today, Dave and Anne are joined again with Paul Miller, who will talk about how he endured in love through similar circumstances that I just mentioned. That's tomorrow. We hope you'll join us. On behalf of Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. 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.