How Love Styles Can Help You Grow Closer as a Couple (Part 1 of 2)

Okay, in today's group session, we're going to be talking about emotions and how we can process...

I don't have any emotions. I'm fine. Stop avoiding the issue. Let's do what the counselor says. Maybe I should take charge of this session. Whatever you want. I don't care. Okay, okay, calm down everyone. We can get along.

And look, I brought cupcakes. I thought this was going to work, but it sounds like a waste of time. Well, maybe you can resonate with some of those comments whenever someone says, let's talk about our feelings. Now, despite how awkward that conversation might seem, it really is important to understand how and why we respond to each other emotionally and relationally. And we're going to be exploring that, especially in the context of marriage today. Thanks for joining us for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly.

I'm John Fuller. I think I'm up for the cupcakes. Let's go cupcakes.

Add me to cupcakes. That always solves problems, right? Hey, John, this is a good topic. It sometimes is a tough topic.

Maybe husbands tend to back up a little bit. We're going to talk about early childhood attachment issues and how they usually blossom then as an adult. And that shows up in your marriage a lot, like those trigger things that happen. Yeah, you met your marriage, John, right? Yeah, I met my marriage, John.

But this is one of those topics. We're going to go a couple of days here and talk with some excellent guests about those triggers. How We Love is the name of the book. And you will be familiar with two of our guests today.

Right. Mylan and Kay Yurkovich have been here a number of times, always popular guests. And they do talk about this love styles concept that they've developed. They've been involved in marriage counseling for decades and specialize in attachment research. We also have Mark and Amy Cameron here. Mark is a licensed marriage and family therapist. Amy works as a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner.

And for the past several years, Mark and Amy have been working with the Yurkovichs in the ministry. So today, the basis of our conversation is a book that we've talked about before here. It's always good to revisit. How We Love, Discover Your Love Style, Enhance Your Marriage. And this is an eminently practical, helpful book for you.

Get a copy from us. The link is in the show notes. Mylan and Kay, welcome back. It's good to see you. Thanks, Jim. Thanks, John. It's so good to be here. Yeah, Mark, Amy, welcome for the first time.

Thank you. Good to see you guys. We have a table full. A full table.

For the YouTube watchers. They can see this is packed. This is like Thanksgiving.

Yes. Where's the kids' table? I want to go hang out. No cupcakes. The cupcakes. No cupcakes. We'll go with some pumpkin pie.

Who knows? That's coming. Mylan, let's start with you. We want to get into the individual stories, each of yours in a minute. But let's start with the key terms that we were talking about, like emotional attachment and what you've termed our love styles.

What is emotional attachment? How does it translate into how we react or interact with other people? We were made in the image and likeness of God. And so we resemble God as in comparison to all of the rest of creation. And we have two parts to our being, a logical thinking, linear side. We also have an emotional side. Our God is an emotional God.

He is also a logical and linear God. So being made in the image and likeness of God, we have the capacity to think and feel. Now, often in our society, in our schools, in our work, we don't acknowledge feelings and emotions very much.

We hardly acknowledge them at all. But God wants us to be able to do so. And in our relationships, we're supposed to be people who can access and have emotional intelligence so we can describe our inner selves as Jesus did the night before he died when he said, my soul is distressed to the point of death.

Come watch and pray with me. It's so true and so good. And we pay little attention to it, actually. And you guys are so brilliant, really, at identifying those things, usually that take place in our childhood, that shape these attitudes that we have. Kay, you've identified several love styles. Take us through the list and just give us a quick definition of each so we have some common glossary here.

All right. So there's five love styles. The avoider is a detached person. They don't know feelings and needs. The pleaser is someone who is always wanting to make everybody happy. Harmony is their key word. But when it comes to difficult emotions or especially conflict, they avoid that as well. Avoiders avoid conflict, so do pleasers, but for different reasons. Avoiders avoid conflict because it might get messy with emotions.

Pleasers are fearful of conflict. Then we have the vacillators. Vacillators are ambivalently attached. They feel like very idealized in the beginning and excited, but easily disappointed. So when vacillators get disappointed, they protest. And then you have people who are raised in just very difficult homes, and they would fall more in the category of the controller or the victim. And these people have a lot of trauma, and our heart really goes out to them.

The controller controls because their homes were so unpredictable growing up that they need to have control for predictability. And victims learn to tolerate the intolerable, and so they feel the intolerable is quite normal to them. Ah, that's amazing. In that context, I mean, that's what the book is filled with, are those examples and then how we interact with each other.

Mark and Amy, let me get you in here. I want you to explain this statement. I've kind of alluded to it, but this is it.

And this might be the question. Most marital problems don't originate in marriage. They originate from your family of origin. Well, so everything that we know, we have learned from somewhere. And everything that you've learned has been taught to you. You've had a teacher. So everything that we know about emotions and about relationships, we've had teachers. And our first teachers are in our families of origins.

They are our parents. And so they teach us, how do we learn how to recognize our emotions? And how do we learn how to link emotions to needs? Every emotion has a need. If I feel misunderstood, then I need to be understood. If I feel un-understood, then I need to be heard. So here's a definition of emotional intelligence for you. Emotional intelligence is understanding what emotions are driving my behaviors to get a corresponding need met.

And so we learn in our families of origin, if those things are recognized and attended to. So for instance, using those examples I just gave you here, if I don't feel heard, then maybe I need to raise my voice to be heard. So that's the behavior.

Or maybe I realize I'm not going to get heard, so I just go quiet, and I just shut down. And now when we get into marriage, those things start to play out again all over, because we just do what we've learned to do. Yeah. Amy, you guys refer to this as like dance steps.

Yes. So how does that resemble a dance step? Well, Mylan and Kay coined the term attachment core pattern therapy. So there's attachment research, but what they did with the research was how their attachment styles dance. So the avoider pleaser. What does conflict look like for them?

For the vacillator vacillator, what does conflict look like for them? And so the dance patterns are very different, because you have this attachment style over here that doesn't really like conflict, and then you have this attachment style that's not afraid to step up to the plate and, you know, confront. So learning, like learning the dance of my own reactivity really helped me, because, you know, reactivity, you know, we think of our nervous system going into fight or flight.

I had to realize, hey, like, when I'm angry, like, what's underneath there? And usually there's an unmet need that you can link back to childhood. And it's nice to be able to flesh that out with your spouse and develop empathy as you dance together.

Yeah, no, it's good. I kind of referred to that as the triggers. You know, we do a lot of counseling here at Focus, and we have caring Christian counselors for couples to call us. You're right, right. But we get so capable in a marriage to push each other's triggers.

And then I don't know why we find that useful, but somehow it just continues to repeat itself, you know. Kay, let me jump to you, and you guys can answer that if you'd like to in the way that you answer these other questions. But I want to ask you, Kay, you're a classic avoider. This is in the book, so I'm not disclosing something.

How could you say that about her? You're an avoider. Describe the avoider, how those things were learned, the environment that you had, and then how that led into some conflict for you and Mylon.

All right. Well, I grew up in a home that never once talked about feelings. If I got mad, my dad said, you better stop crying or I'm going to give you something to cry about.

If I was sad or if I was mad, he got madder still. My mom got very anxious around emotions. So avoiders learn to shut down emotions. They're not well received.

They're not entertained. They're not sought out. And in fact, sometimes they cause difficulty in my family. So I learned to shut down emotions. And if you, like Mark said, if you start to shut down emotions, you shut down needs as well, because they link together. So avoiders become independent. My family valued responsibility. They valued productivity.

If there were any accolades, it was for getting some job well done. And so when I married Mylon, this was very normal to me. The avoider attachment isn't, I didn't have a lot of empathy because empathy comes from another person giving you empathy, giving you comfort, seeing a distressed feeling or distress in your life and seeking you out and asking you to put words to that. So I didn't have words for my inner self. If you asked me what I felt, I said, what all avoiders say, fine.

Yeah. Let me ask you with friendships, just to add that lesser intimate quality in here, would they have described you as kind of cool, emotionally? You know, I don't know that I feel attached to Kay. I'm just trying to describe what those friendships might look like to help people. I think the avoider attachment goes across the board. I think friends would have described me that way.

I think that avoiders, if you don't know how you feel or you don't entertain your distress or learn to process with people what you're going through, then you're not going to think to do that with another person. I didn't think, well, John might be having a hard day or he doesn't look too good. I think I'm going to ask him about it. And it's like, he'll figure it out.

He's fine. Right. Mylon, you kind of hit it, but I do want to dig a little deeper on your bent, so that pleaser mentality.

Just again, describe that bouncing off of Kay's descriptions. And what does that look like day to day for a pleaser to live through life? It's miserable. But you're pleasing everybody. No. We love people like you.

No, that's true. It's miserable because Jesus was not a fearful proximity seeker to try and make everybody smile so everybody would feel good. So everybody would have a smile on their face. You know, my nickname used to be smiling Mylon. I would smile because if you smiled, then I would feel that I was okay. Because in my home, if there were no smiles, it meant trouble was coming. So my smile was an attempt to get everybody to smile so I could feel comfortable.

It was for me. So when I was asking Kay, how is she? It was for my benefit.

I was asking, not really for her. So her avoidance and dismissiveness, I was very keyed in and hyper vigilant about other people and what they were thinking and feeling because that's what I was at home. I had to see if there was a storm coming, what was the look and the mood on people's faces.

And so I was constantly reading people trying to figure out what's going on and what can I predict is going to be true for the rest of the day. So I then approached my relationship with Kay, and she's also an introvert. So she's quiet, but silence at my home growing up meant a storm was coming. Yes, a problem. A problem. So it unnerved me so I'd over pursue her. And then that would unnerve her. Right. Thus the dance. Thus the dance. There it is.

And it was a bad dance. We don't do that anymore. She's not an avoider anymore. And I am rarely a pleaser anymore. And we have such a great relationship. But you're right, Jim, on the surface, people like pleasers because they're very easygoing and they want to take care of you.

But as Mylan is saying, it's not really for your benefit, it's really for their ease. Yeah, I say that because I think I know one. Me. This is Focus on the Family with Jim Daly and we've got a table full, as Jim said earlier. We've got Mylan and Kay Yerkovich here and Mark and Amy Cameron as well. We're talking about the love styles. And I know you're going to benefit from this book and all the content. It's associated with the ministry that the Yerkovitches have started and the Cameron's are now kind of assuming. So contact us today to get a copy of the book, How We Love, Discover Your Love Style, Enhance Your Marriage.

You'll find the details in the show notes. Mark, I understand you and Amy are both vacillators. I think when Kay was describing vacillators, she definitely looked at the two of you. So now we're all desperate. Okay, we have avoider, we have pleaser.

What is the vacillator? Because you're going to speak to it from experience. So let me clarify this too. We are actually in recovery right now. So Kay is a recovering avoider. Mylan is a recovering pleaser and we're a recovering vacillator. Because here's the good news.

The good news is we don't have to remain this way. But what a vacillator is, a vacillator grows up in a home where they get intermittent connection growing up. Now sometimes that has to do with it's very obvious. They may have parents who divorce and they bounce back and forth between custody or they may have a parent who lives out of town and they don't see them as often. But sometimes it's a parent's job. So what happens that takes them away traveling, or something like that, or they would shift work. And so the comings and the goings are irregular for a child. And so what happens for the vacillators, they get some connection that they enjoy, and then they're left to wait on connection. And in the waiting they feel unseen, unknown, misunderstood, and they get mad.

And so when the parent comes back to give them the attention, they want to pout, they want to sulk, they want to demonstrate their feelings and show the parent, I'm upset that you made me wait, hoping that the parent will pursue them and come after them and not do that again. And then they grow up, they go into adulthood looking for this consistent connection that they didn't have as a child. And when they meet someone, they are all in. They love the dating phase. Yeah, the dating phase is good. All about time and attention and connection.

And then of course, when you get married, kind of the dating elements fade a little bit. Amy, describe that for you as a vacillator. I mean, when you use the term clingy, is that a vacillator? I don't know, like someone in the relationship is constantly tapping you for input and affirmation.

It could be. But yeah, timeline story for me kind of starts, you know, my parents, unfortunately my dad committed suicide at age seven. And at that point, my mom just kind of that disconnect happened, you know, she was connected and then, you know, kind of fell into addiction and stuff.

And, you know, I kind of grew up and she kind of digressed. And so that created that imprint. And so kind of tracing back that imprint is very important because, you know, then go on to the dating phase, like vacillators love the dating phase. Like there's focus, there's connection, like they mistake intensity for intimacy.

And so they just swing into it, all into it. And I do have some pleaser in me. My grandparents were great. They grazed me in the Baptist church, but at 18, it was like, I moved in with my boyfriend and they're like, when's the wedding?

You know, like, that's going to solve everything, right? So I got married. But unfortunately, you know, that marriage ended in infidelity, but I didn't really know who I was at 18.

And neither did he, to be fair, you know. And so I had even further disappointment. You know, I did have a beautiful daughter out of the deal. But when I met Mark, same thing.

Now, I had a lot more head knowledge of box checks of like, you know, I want a Christian that, you know, applies the values, walks the walk, talks the talk. So we married, but that intensively that intensity for intimacy was there and we did not understand how to resolve conflict. So when real life came, you know, blended family, school, all that disconnect made to wait, that created that storm again of, you know, disappointment. And so the vacillator is a great term because clinical term is anxious ambivalent.

And I don't really identify myself as an anxious person, but the anxiety is being made to wait. So you go from these high hopes to deep disappointment and that's the swing. Yeah. Now we think in that context, that classic line of expectations is part of that. You have these expectations of my fulfillment. So that's what the book defines as idealism.

So the higher it is, the further it's going to fall off that pedestal. Mark, in your context as a vacillator, and this is good, I'm sure people are going, wow, this is describing me. And that's what we want. We want you to connect with these styles because I'm sure, like anything, like love languages or Kevin Lehman's birth order, there are patterns that you guys have touched on too, that are in the human race. These are God, you know, God-given and then the things that this life corrupts in us. These are the attributes that we need to identify to have healthier God-honoring relationships. Mark, you also, as a vacillator, you were married before too.

Is that resonating what Amy's saying? Yeah, I'll give a little bit of my story growing up. So I grew up with a Pleaser mom and a vacillator dad. But growing up, it always felt uncomfortable with my dad. He was socially awkward.

He didn't know how to interact well with others or connect well with us. And it wasn't until adulthood when a couple of my nieces and nephews were diagnosed on the spectrum, we realized that my dad was likely on the spectrum. And so, even though my parents were together, when I was close to my dad, it was uncomfortable. But I longed for a dad who I could connect with.

And so, that's how the imprint formed in me. And so, I have a similar story to Amy in that I met and married my spouse, my first spouse, very quickly. We had a child and then she left.

There was infidelity involved on her part. And then I was a single dad for about six years. And then I met Amy. And we both had two seven-year-olds at the time. And as Amy mentioned, we missed the intensity for intimacy. And we were all in, in that dating phase.

And we got married within three months. And then that real life settled in. And we let each other down. And then the vacillator, when they get let down, they play the anger card. They get mad. They pout. They sulk.

They give a demonstration of their feelings, just like they learned to do when they were younger. Yeah. So, the two vacillators, the two of you marrying, I mean, that sounds like fireworks. A volcano, of course. Until you can figure this out. It's a volcano. Okay. We'll let you describe it. But it is that.

It's volatile, is the point. So, how did you even get a grip? I mean, here you are. How did that connection happen? Were you going, okay, this isn't healthy?

Where did that start? Well, I think we knew that the way that we had conflict wasn't healthy, but we just didn't know how to resolve it. We didn't know how to figure it out. Both of us are wanting the other person to understand us. And this is key, though. You both are believers in Jesus.

I mean, you have that capacity to read the word, know the word. But again, like so many of us, if you're not aware and you don't put corrections into practice, you'll just be doing the same dance for decades. Well, these love styles, they're, Mylan and Kay's calling them love styles, but they're attachment styles. As Mylan mentioned, there's 80 years of research in this. And so, yes, there's birth order that can shape family dynamics, and there can be love languages, there can be different temperaments that we have.

But these are really childhood emotional injuries. There's a difference between who we are and how we are. If you were born an introvert or an extrovert, that's who you are. You can't change that part of you. But attachment is about how you've learned to bond with others.

That's how you are. And that part can actually be changed about us. And often, I'm sure we would think of that as a coping mechanism. And the more serious these issues are, the more serious those coping mechanisms become.

It could be drug addiction, alcoholism, other things to cope with the pain of life. Mylan and Kay, let me come back to you. In your book, How We Love, you describe a two-faceted love style known as chaotic, the controller victim. So those are the last two.

Let's describe those for the audience. Controller victim under that banner of chaos, which is interesting to me, because chaos is such a term for sin entering the world. Chaos begins when sin entered the world, and God's Shalom is not present, is peace.

So this is really intriguing to me spiritually. Well, the controller and the victim come from chaos themselves. Many times these homes have addictions. There may be physical abuse. There may be neglect. There could be sexual abuse. But the child has no rhyme or reason to connection. In my home, if we all played the avoider game, everything went more smoothly. Or in your home, if you were the pleaser, you could sometimes win back that angry mom. In this home, nothing works. It's just chaos. There's no way to predict, and there's more harm than good luck lessons. There's fright without solutions for the child.

Yes. So in that kind of a situation, the more feisty kids will grow up and at some point at some point usually take on the dominant parent. And they will go toe to toe. Many times they leave home early, or they're put in foster care, or there may be court-ordered things that happen. The parents may go to prison. And so the feistier kid is more likely to become the controller, because they are never going to be in that one down position again.

Childhood was one down, humiliation, shame, terror. So they're going to control their world. And I don't think it's a conscious thought. I think it's a response to pain. It's an emotional response. It's an emotional response to pain. And many times when we meet a controlling person, they don't even really know why they're so controlling.

And we explain it's for predictability, because your childhood had none. And then the victim is... Well, the victim, as you said earlier, has learned to tolerate the intolerable in this dangerous setting. And they, again, were a child who was frightened but couldn't go to the parents for comfort, because a parent who's supposed to be a comfort isn't there for them in that role.

The parent is dangerous. So that's why, to your point a moment ago, Jim, that we turn to other things to comfort ourselves. This is the origin, in many cases, for addiction. If I can't go to somebody for help because we're told to comfort one another, we're told to encourage one another, we're told to provide encouragement and support and bear one another's burdens, these are all biblical mandates. If I don't have that, I have to turn to something else to make all the pain go away. So a lot of people turn to addictive elements and that are just...

There's so many things available to take all that pain away. You know what's interesting as you're sharing this, what I'm thinking about is Jesus' compassion for people that he encountered in this place, Mary, and her difficulty sexually. And it seems like he uniquely knew that these were the pitfalls of humanity, because he's God. Oh, I think God's heart bleeds for people, for children who grow up in difficult situations. And the patterns are so predictable, and the Lord knows that. He does, and he draws them into his church for healing, and yet that healing, you think about it, the better your childhood, the easier your marriage, because you've got a lot of great skills to help you build a healthy relationship.

The more trauma you have, or the more dysfunction in your family, the harder your marriage is gonna be, because you're learning a lot of things that don't work well, but that's all you know. Yeah, that's so good. Wow, this time has flown by. And let's come back for another day and continue talking about this.

I think we've laid the groundwork, and if you're saying, I'm an avoider, I'm a pleaser, I'm a controller, I'm a victim, get ahold of us. So the first thing to do is get a copy of this great book by Mylon and Kay Yurkovich, How We Love. If you can afford it, make a gift of any amount, we'll send it as our way, saying thank you, that way you're participating in ministry, and you're getting a great resource to help you and your marriage. If you can't afford it, get ahold of us, we're a Christian ministry, we're gonna trust others, we'll cover the cost of that, and we're doing this together.

We want your marriage to be healthier, so get ahold of us, don't worry about it, we'll send it out to you right away. And then again, we also have our Caring Christian Counselors here, we can do a consult with you, that's what the donors of Focus on the Family provide to take care of that. Just let us know, and we have resources, counselors in your area, we can refer you to for further connection and further help. And the bottom line is, get in touch with us if this is resonating with you. Our contact information is in the show notes, or give us a call, 800, the letter A in the word family. On behalf of the team, thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller, inviting you back next time as we continue the conversation, and once again, help you and your family thrive in Christ. If the fights with your spouse have become unbearable, if you feel like you can't take it anymore, there's still hope. Hope Restored Marriage Intensives have helped thousands of couples like yours. Our biblically based counseling will help you find the root of your problems and face them together. Call us at 1-866-875-2915. We'll talk with you, pray with you, and help you find out which program will work best. That's 1-866-875-2915.