Identifying Triggers in Your Marriage (Part 1 of 2)

Man, I knew my marriage was falling apart.

I just didn't know how to fix it. I felt like I would always be alone, even if I stayed married. At Focus on the Family's Hope Restored Marriage Intensive, we offer hope to couples in crisis so they can have the marriage they've always dreamed of. For the first time, I felt like my husband truly heard me. I've received some great tools from the counselors that have changed my life and my marriage. To begin the journey of finding health, go to HopeRestored.com today. So I had to do a cleaning house of my idols and my thinking, and it had to start with me, that the Lord had to work in me to work on how I was going to love God.

Because regardless of whatever God did or didn't do, even if He was sinning, it did not mean that I had to sin. And so I had to start being humble and saying, okay, Lord, trying to fix Him isn't working. You've got to start fixing me. Well, today we're all about marriage, and Amber Leah joins us on Focus on the Family, along with her husband Guy, to help you learn how to de-escalate and have a more peaceful relationship with your spouse. Your host is Focus president and author, Jim Daly, and I'm John Fuller. John, it's pretty normal for marriages to experience the ebb and...

Your host is Focus president and author, Jim Daly, and I'm John Fuller. John, it's pretty normal for marriages to experience the ebb and flow of relationship. You have those beautiful days, those wonderful moments, and then you have the maybe not so wonderful moments like, do I have to tell you again where the milk is? Or I'm so sorry.

Or worse, but the irritating things, right? Here's some encouragement from the book of Hebrews. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Maybe not you or your spouse, but Jesus is, and that's something to stand on. No matter what things look like with your spouse today, rest in the fact that we have an unchanging God who is willing to comfort you and help you and transform your marriage. Today, we're going to bravely trudge into some areas that might be a little uncomfortable, the triggers in your marriage. Every marriage has them, and all of us need God's help to get through those things and kind of mature so those triggers don't trigger us, right? And I've asked Gene, my wonderful wife and accountability partner, to be here with us today.

I think it's wonderful that we have Gene along with us. And Guy and Amber Leah are relationship coaches and co-owners of a faith and family production company in Los Angeles. And they've been married 14 years and have four boys. And they've written a book together called Marriage Triggers, Exchanging Spouses' Angry Reactions for Gentle Biblical Responses.

And we have that here at the ministry. Give us a call, 800-A-FAMILY, or click the link in the episode notes to get your copy. Welcome, each and every one of you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

We are so glad to be here. Now, I'm really looking forward to this. I think it's one of the core communication issues in marriage. How do we not trigger each other? How do we better understand those triggers? And we're going to get into that.

Guy and Amber, you came up with the idea, so let's start with you. You describe your marriage as triggered from the start. That sounds a little frightening. Why was that the case? And didn't you enjoy a little bit of a honeymoon period?

Well, emphasis on the word little. We had a little bit of a honeymoon period, but not very long. Things moved very, very quickly for us. When we got married and within a couple of months, we got pregnant.

And so we didn't have that time to kind of develop ourselves and get to know our identity as a young married couple. We quickly shifted directly into parenting and the extra room that was going to be the fun room suddenly turned into the baby's room. And my wife is a wonderful planner. And so she shifted into high gear planning mode and painting and all the things. I'm like, wait a minute.

What about me? He was saying. So is evidence of your growth the fact that you just said she's a wonderful planner.

It sounded so heartfelt. It used to be like, man, she plans everything. It still is.

I'll admit that can still be a thing. Those are one of the differences we have in our relationship is she very much as the planner and she thinks 10 steps ahead. And I'm very happy thinking one or two steps ahead and being in the moment. And so we have to continually find that balance for ourselves. So I get the baby part, but before that, even there were other stressors going on for the newlyweds listening that may be going, oh, my goodness, that's my wife or that's my husband.

What were some of those other stressors? Well, you know, they say opposites attract and there is some truth to that, but it also creates a lot of everyday practical problems. And when you're in a friendship and dating and then you get married, living with one another is a different beast. And, you know, it was even early on just with, for example, we would I wanted to put in our new apartment a wall of portraits, you know, our wedding photo and, you know, make room for when baby comes and all of that. And the planner in me, the big wall of pictures. And I thought on a Saturday, this is going to be amazing. We will all lay it out.

We'll do all the measuring guy. We'll do all the hammering and he was ready to watch the football game, you know, and he was like, whoa, excellent choice. It was the Notre Dame USC football game and that's what I had planned for that day.

That's right. How could you plan that during the SC Notre Dame game? We just had different perspectives on what was important at the time. And because we didn't at the time have the communication skills to work through those things together, which we want to offer people hope that that is possible. At the time, we weren't doing that. We were just triggered and easily provoked to anger.

And so we were reacting instead of responding to each other. And it kind of went downhill. Did either of those things happen then? Did the wall get the pictures or did the game get watched?

The wall got done and the game got watched part of it. But neither of us were very happy about either place. It ended up in the book.

So it still exists as one of those days. It was a pivotal day for us. Yeah, well, and you both became convinced that you'd married the wrong person. Tell us about that.

That's a big statement. Yeah, I married Mr. Wrong for sure. And he married Ms. All Wrong. I mean, we just we got it all wrong. And I used to think, well, I believe in God's sovereignty, but boy, this was a mistake. I mean, I really felt that way early on, even though I loved him. And a lot of the time I liked him. We had so many triggers that I wondered, how is this going to happen?

How are we going to navigate this for the rest of our lives? And it wasn't until God started working on me personally, after I nagged and argued and yelled for a really long time and that didn't work. The Lord eventually started to say, Amber, you are Ms. All Wrong and he's Mr. Wrong. But that's because nobody is perfect.

There is no perfect person except for Jesus Christ. And so as long as you continue to be prideful and argue, you are not going to live life to the full or have the marriage that I designed. Because the minute that you say I do, you do become a match made in heaven.

And so that's what I had to come to was like, you know what? We made a vow. God did bring us together. He is wrong.

I'm wrong. But that's because we're two people that are sinful. We need to yield to being perfected in Christ day by day.

And that's what's going to make us right for each other. You know, Amber, as you describe that, one of the things that certainly Jean and I have encountered, I think you and Dina, John, have probably encountered this too. It's hard to, if I could say it this way, get your fingers out of your ears. Because I think we get into the habit in our marital relationships where the more pain you're causing me, the more trigger you're causing me, the harder I stuff my fingers into my ears because I don't want to hear it.

And it is the exact opposite of what the Lord wants from you. Right? Yeah. The pain acts as blinders.

You know, it filters us to not being able to hear or see each other. That is a fork in the road in your relationship. You got to decide if that's where you want to live in that constant conflict. Amber came up with this wonderful principle that I think is one of the pivotal things in our book and in our marriage is the development of a me first attitude. And at first thought, that sounds like prideful me first. I want to get what I want. It's actually the flip of that. It's the, if I want my wife to be more loving, then I need to start with me and I need to be more loving.

If I want her to be more understanding and compassionate about my needs, I need to show her that compassion and the understanding of her needs first be first and it changes everything. Well, that's a good foundation. I mean, obviously let's go to some of the triggers in the book because I want to hit those and you're going to come back next time because we're going to keep this discussion going and Jean wants to tell the world about all of my stuff, but one of the things Amber you identified with and Jean said, yeah, that's one for me too, is when the house is a mess, that's a trigger.

How is that a trigger? I mean, are Guy and I triggering this and you and Jean? You know, it's a combination of things and it, you know, every marriage is unique, right? Because you've got two unique personalities and that's going to make up a unique marriage personality, but for a lot of couples, we found that one or the other is more bothered by clutter or dirtiness, you know, which are two different things. Sometimes the house is very clean. Wives will tell their husbands when they, you know, come in after being gone from work or whatever and we'll say the house is clean. It's just cluttered. It's messy, but those are two different things. I'm trying really hard here, but so for Guy and I, you know, he's not as bothered or triggered by clutter as I am. And when you're home a lot, like I was with our kids when they were young, a lot of couples will tell us this is such a problem. And so I had to disrupt that habit of being reacting, being quick to anger. And you know, I believed God when he said be slow to anger, you know, be quick to listen.

And I had to say, okay, deep breath. What can we do together to tackle this? You know, put some things in place, communicate. Part of it was just me practically having to get some better storage bins for the mess, teaching the kids to take on a little bit more responsibility. But if that's your biggest trigger, you know, don't get overwhelmed by the 10 triggers that you have, but take one at a time. And we would do that. We're like, look, the constant clutter is not working for me.

What can we do to strategize together? I don't want to keep reacting. I want to be more proactive. If I can say from my side of things, you know, I was working a really intense job where I'd be at work 10, 12 hours a day and I'd come home and Amber's got, you know, two or three or four kids at home that this time it was three kids, two of them still in diapers. And I'd come home and could barely open the door because there's like toys all over the floor, you know, and I'm walking into that going like, I just got off work and I should come into a house that's clean and ready and you know, and I'd be frustrated or I wouldn't say anything and I would allow that trigger to kind of bubble up in me and it would immediately push me towards frustration and anger right away. But until I gained a full understanding of what her day was like with those kids in the house by herself without a lot of friends at all in our new neighborhood that we had moved into, until I had a better understanding of what her days were like, I was triggered very quickly. And so once we had a better understanding of that, it allowed me to be more understanding of walking into that.

I went through a job loss and while that wasn't a good thing in the end, God used it for good because he was home more and he got to see how difficult it was and that made things better for us. Let me ask Guy for those spouses who can't walk in those shoes then, who do have that stressful job and are stressed out. Well, I can ask Jim as well.

I'd say ask Guy. Stressed out by the clutter and the chaos. What advice do you have for them? I want to say that it's a really simple one, but I just think that you have to have an understanding of what your spouse, what their day is like and what they're going through. And again, it goes back to that me first attitude a little bit.

When you are concentrating on yourself, thinking about what your attitude is going into something, I think you can get a better understanding of what you're walking into with your spouse. You would do that. Also, he would call me on the way home from work. He got in the habit of doing that just to kind of get a lay of the land, a feel for the environment he was walking into so he could prepare himself mentally to walk into that.

That was one thing we did. I'd take a moment either in traffic or right out in front of the house while in the car just, how's it going? What am I walking into? What do you need help with? Just so I know. That's a good question.

What do you need help with? When I would call home if Dina said, what do you want? I knew that I was walking into something. Exactly.

Sounds more like military communication. We got four zombies in the room there. Look out when you come in the door. Yes. Yes.

Prepare yourself for the landmines. OK, well, that was very good of the ladies on this house being clean thing. Now, let's go to a guy one guy when it comes to us being triggered, maybe backseat driving. I mean, I'm terrible at that. Yeah.

Right, Jean? I'll confess it. Me too.

I can be a backseat driver. Absolutely. She didn't hesitate much there. No, but we've worked through that. Good.

I'm glad. That one's off to the next guy. There was early in your marriage, you had a driving experience. I think with the two of you, what happened? And we'll respond. Yeah, we were, you know, we so we live in Los Angeles and it is just crazy. It is fill every hole. It's traffic for hours.

It's just nuts. And on this particular evening, we were driving back. It rained a little bit. And we were I was changing lanes and someone in front of me just changed right in front of me and caused me to have to, you know, jerk the wheel to get out of the way. And Amber immediately was like, Guy, what are you doing?

You shouldn't drive like that. And it was this immediate lash out at me. And I'm like, it wasn't me.

It was him. And I'm trying to be defensive and take care of this. Let me ask you this question. If you didn't swerve, would you have been hit? Oh, absolutely. I'm on your side on this one, Guy. I am now. I wasn't hit, but I am now. Yes, the principle is and we didn't necessarily work it out that night as successfully. But the truth is, this was a habit of mine. I mean, I was it wasn't just when we were in danger. I was always telling him how to drive. I admit that.

Yeah. But what I was able to do is to think the best about my wife and realize that she wasn't lashing out at me in my bad driving. She was actually lashing out at her sense of safety for our four kids that were in the back seat most of the time.

So she being the mama bear, her concern was safety for them. And so that's where her frustration was coming from. So I just had to realize that it wasn't towards me.

It was literally about the situation and allowed me to accept her anxiety and all that in a much different way. And it really changed. It still crops up from time to time. This is an organic thing. Marriage, you know, every day is different.

So it still comes up. But it required a conversation. I mean, one of the things that guy and I did is, I mean, it was so constant that we were getting frustrated in the car. We were like, look, we're going to have to drive together a lot for the next however many years.

We've got to figure this out. So I was like, okay, I'm going to focus on you. You're the driver. You focus on driving. I'm the passenger. I will work on being a passenger and not a driver.

And I will try to allow my anxieties to take a back seat, you know? Yeah. But the question is, how did you control your tongue? That's what all of this is about.

This is couple things. I'd bite my tongue, literally. I'm not kidding.

I would just like bite my tongue, you know, like, okay, Amber, zip it. But we started listening to podcasts or books on tape just to distract me. Were these instructional driving? Yes.

Focus on the family podcast, no doubt. Just picture the blue skies. Water trickling. But honestly, like, it seems like a small thing, you know, being a back seat driver. But it really, the perpetual, you know, interjections of while someone's driving, it gets to you.

It just creates a layer of frustration that you may not even pick up on overtly. So now when Guy is driving, I'm in charge of the map. And not in a, hey, Turkey, you were supposed to turn there, which I still do. That's a great move, actually. Yeah, but, you know, and letting him take the scenic route. You know, if he doesn't go the way I would go, it's okay. Let it go.

That's good. Yeah, this is Focus on the Family with Jim Daly and his wife, Jean. Our guests also include Guy and Amber Leah. We're talking about the book by the Leah's, Marriage Triggers, Exchanging Spouses, Angry Reactions for Gentle Biblical Responses. Great resource. We've got it here at the ministry.

Give us a call, 800-A-FAMILY, or click the link in the episode notes to get your copy. And Amber, I can relate to this next trigger. Actually, I can relate to all the triggers.

Frankly, not. Oh, we're signing off. Thank you for joining Focus on the Family. But in your book, you've mentioned that you've had a struggle with an intimacy idol in your relationship because you didn't feel loved.

Tell us about that. Yes, I had very many preconceived notions and expectations about what our marriage was supposed to look like. And for us, I thought it was going to be a lot of security financially, white picket fence, Guy will go to work.

I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom and work from home on occasion. And the Lord, all his plans for us are good and they work together for good. But in those early years, I didn't think much of the plans that Guy was making for our family were good. And so I had this idol of closeness and intimacy that he was going to do things my way. We were going to be on the same page. And when that didn't happen, it caused me to become really bitter.

And so no matter what Guy would say or do, he couldn't get it right. And that is a really dangerous place to be. And it's a painful place to be. Well, it sets up conflict, obviously. Jean, I just, you know, for people to understand your connection with this, what were you feeling? And I think it's rooted in expectations. That's what you started with.

Absolutely. That we have unrealistic expectations. And I would say, you know, the maybe the greatest thing that I've learned through marriage is that your spouse cannot read your mind. And I can remember being hurt that Jim couldn't read my mind. He didn't know everything that I expected. And if I had to tell him what I was expecting, that that made me angry. And until I recognize that is so unfair, only Jesus, only God can read our minds.

And I am not God. I know that every day. And you should sit down with your spouse and during the season and say, OK, this is really what my expectations are for my birthday or for when you come home for work. Or these are my expectations for when I come home for work.

And how can we get there? The birthday one's funny. You should bring that up because there was one birthday where Jean said to me, I just, you know, I'm not sure you can tell us all the motivation behind this, but said, you know, I really don't want anything for my birthday.

I'm good this year, basically. Very, very crisp, bright attitude. I thought, oh, wow, take some pressure. So birthday comes and, you know, we have dinner. And the next day I could tell she's not happy.

And I'm like, what's the matter? You didn't even get me a card for my birthday. Yeah, well, I thought you said what I heard was you didn't want that. You said, I mean, anything is like a gift. It's a card. It's anything. But that wasn't quite it.

No. And I still remember where we were when I said it. And what I said was, what I meant was I didn't want Jim to buy me a gift. I didn't want Jim and the boys, but that didn't mean I didn't want homemade cards from the boys, you know, that I wanted to make.

I wanted, you know, dinner. She wasn't fully letting you off the hook. What she didn't realize is she was actually giving the boys and I a gift.

Yeah. A day off on birthdays. We thought, wow, that is so kind of mom. I will say, I mean, truly after that, I was able to say to Jim, okay, these are my expectations for my birthday.

Can you work with the boys to make a handwritten cards? Now you guys had this with Christmas, right? Your first or second Christmas, you had a stocking battle.

Right. I mean, we were so excited. We were going to do stockings. You say it, Guy.

Yeah, you did it. I was so excited when she said she wanted to do stockings. I was really excited that that was going to be a tradition in our family because that was something that was a tradition that my family had. Uh, the night before Christmas, we would always get together and open the stockings and it was so much fun, but our stockings would be filled with gag gifts, um, and little funny things and just crazy stuff.

And we do even a white elephant thing where you'd end up sending the bad gift around. And, um, and it was so much fun. Amber's stocking for me was filled with cologne and movie tickets and all this wonderful, you know, oils and different fun things. And it was, boy, we were red feather boa. And I was pretty sure that pulling that red feather boa out of my Christmas stocking, that we weren't going to make it to Christmas. The beginning of the year, because I had been so thoughtful, all these favorite things in his stocking, valuable gifts. And I had just gag gift after gag gift.

And I just thought, wow, we are really living in two different planets here. You know, Amber and Guy and Jean, I just, uh, at the end here, I think it's important to really hone in on that idea of, um, coveting the ideal marriage, having that high, high impossible expectation, I guess, Amber, that you describe in your book. I want to, again, address that. Why is that really one of the most damaging things to a marriage? When you have an idol in your thinking and you don't even realize it because your spouse is not living up to your expectations or your marriage or your circumstances, the life that you've created is not the life that you hoped for and prayed for. You have a choice to make at some point in that moment, you can continue to be triggered and angry and bitter, and you can go down a path toward destruction because Satan is alive and well, and he is seeking whom he may devour. And we're convinced that he was trying to devour us in those early years of our marriage.

And even now he still is on the attack. But the other option was to recognize that my desire for what I want is either going to become so obsessive that I sin if I don't have it. And that is an idol in my life because I covet that more than putting on humility, a compassionate heart, kindness and forgiveness, and being open to trusting God with my marriage and my husband and my life. And so I had to tear down all those idols of what I wanted. And I had to start approaching Guy differently and he had to start approaching me differently. And ultimately we had to say, our lives are not our own.

If I am so fixated on Guy's ability to make me happy or not, or my circumstances to be ideal, then I will always be miserable because in this world I will have trouble. But Jesus says, fear not for I have overcome the world. So I had to do a cleaning house of my idols and my thinking. And it had to start with me, that the Lord had to work in me to work on how I was going to love Guy.

Because regardless of whatever Guy did or didn't do, even if he was sinning, it did not mean that I had to sin. And so I had to start being humble and saying, okay, Lord, trying to fix him isn't working. You've got to start fixing me.

No, it's so good. And it's such a great place. I would say most of marriage counseling tries to get at that realization that if you can get there, your marriage is actually going to be in a good place over the long haul. And that's what we try to do with Hope Restored, the couples that come to our intensive marriage counseling. And, you know, these are really broken relationships, and it's amazing that the post two-year survey that we do with these couples, 81% is now the number of couples that are doing better and still married, 81%. And if you ask Dr. Bob Paul, the one who is responsible for the clinical side of the effort, it really is teaching couples how to communicate.

And when they get that skill set, their marriages actually can do much better and thrive, which is the goal. Well, this has been really great. We've got to come back next time, and we're going to talk about more triggers. And hopefully, you know, some of this is a little lighthearted. Some of it's very serious, as you just described. And our goal here at Focus is to make sure that your marriage is doing as well as it can do, especially as Christians.

You look at the culture right now. We need to be committed to the Lord in our marriages. People are watching, and they want to see, is it really something different?

Do they really love each other the way they are supposed to? And I think it's a wonderful challenge. It's not something to shrink back from. It's a good thing. Let's show the world what Jesus does in our marriages, because they're that different from those that don't know the Lord. And I would love for you to get a copy of this book. If you can become a monthly sustaining partner for Focus on the Family, that would be great. It really helps us out to know month to month what the budget is and can be. I'll send you a copy of Marriage Triggers as our way of saying thank you. And if you can't do that monthly, we get it.

One-time gift is also deeply appreciated, and we'll get the book out to you for that gift as well. And you've heard me say it before, but if you can't afford it, we'll get it to you, because we believe in the content. Just call us, and we will trust that other donors will take care of the cost. We care about you.

We believe in the content we put out here at Focus on the Family, and we want you to have the best marriage you could possibly have in this world. Yeah, so get in touch, and please let us know how we can help you. Our number is 800, the letter A in the word family, 800-232-6459, or stop by the episode notes.

We've got the link right there for you. Amber, Guy, Jean, can you come back? Absolutely. We'd love to. You sure you want to come back? Let's do that.

And you're sure you want her to come back? Absolutely. I love it. I love it when Jean is here. Well, we'll continue next time with a look at Jim and Jean's marriage, and hopefully give you some more practical advice from Alias. Thanks for joining us today. On behalf of Jim and team, I'm John Fuller, and do plan to be with us next time as we continue the conversation, and once more, help you and your family thrive in Christ. See you next time.