Dealing with Emotional Disconnection in Marriage

You have to intentionally find guys that will have intentional conversations that aren't necessarily that comfortable.

But if you find the right guys, and you ask the Lord for these guys, but if you find the right guys, they can go there with you. And they have to teach you. I had to be taught. It didn't just come to me. I'm still learning. Well, Jim Turner thinks it's important for men to connect emotionally with others in relationship.

And God has designed us for relationship, but we live in a fallen world and often that connectedness doesn't happen. Welcome to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller.

Here's a billboard. Women are going to laugh when I say this. Many men are not emotionally connected. So I know you're laughing about that right now, saying, oh, you just caught up with that? Newsflash, yeah. I'm in it.

I'm one of them. And this is a point of conversation that Jean and I will have at times, that she doesn't feel I'm emotionally connected, to which I'm looking at it like a deer in the headlights. I don't even know what you're talking about.

Didn't we have dinner last night together? Yeah. That fits the criteria. I don't think that actually does. So we're all going to learn a bit today about what it means for us men to be more emotionally connected and hopefully learn some tools that will help us to open up.

I don't think our wiring lends itself to this. And we will have a spirited discussion with our guest about what men are all wound up to be. Yeah. Jim Turner is here to share his journey and insights about how he learned to become emotionally connected. He's got a great book. It's called The Disconnected Man, Breaking Down Walls and Restoring Intimacy with Him.

And we've got details about the book in the show notes. Jim, welcome to Focus on the Family. Well, thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

It's good to have you. Full confession so you know my brother, Mike. Yes. We never really talked much about that, but my brother called and said, oh, you're going to have a good friend of mine, Jim, on the program. Yeah. So what's the topic? Disconnected men. Oh, great.

I can't wait. But let's start there. You know, you're saying that men tend to be disconnected.

What's the definition of disconnected? Well, I'm going to correct a little bit because it's not all men. I mean, there are some very, very emotionally connected men, but this is mostly written for women.

It's kind of 50-50. Women who live with a guy that is really emotionally and relationally unavailable, I would say. And it's more of an extreme guy, a guy that you just can't get to know him. He's closed off. He's not available to share his emotions or to let you inside, primarily because he doesn't get there himself. He's got this wall up. And I describe a wall in the book that, you know, he's got this wall he doesn't even have a combination to. He locked it down a long time ago and all of his emotions are behind that wall. And he can get to the happy fun ones in front of that wall. But the ones that are caused by pain or hurt or something in the past, he doesn't get to and nobody else gets to him. Well, let me ask you about that. I mean, it's one of the attributes of men.

I've been thinking about this. Dr. Dobson used to say this, you know, a hundred years ago, the farmer didn't come into the farmhouse at the end of a long day of plowing and say, honey, how was your day? I mean, we just maybe they did, maybe some did. But it's an indication that it's just not maybe a natural place for us to go. We are compartmentalizing gender.

You know, we go to war, we fight these wars, they talk about World War Two, the greatest generation, they came home, they didn't talk about it. And part of that compartmentalization, I guess, can work to protect our emotions, maybe. But at the same time, yeah, we do close down on things that cause pain. I'm not always sure that's a bad thing.

So help me better understand that mechanism that God has given us to have to do difficult things. And then Yeah, I think that's real. And you brought up Dr. Dobson, he did point that out.

And so many guys have put it one way or another that men can compartmentalize and, you know, women's brains are like spaghetti and everything touches and all that they're connected. Yes. You said 14 years ago.

No, I'm kidding. It's like, wow, you remember what I said 14 years ago? I locked that down a long time ago. Right, right. So it's amazing, though, that created ability, I think, does exist in men, we're able to compartmentalize, but it goes too far sometimes. Okay, so that's what you're describing. Yeah, that's what I'm describing.

Yeah, is those, those men who absolutely don't want to go there, or they're unaware that they're not able to go there. That's, that's more of what I'm writing about. My story was, my wife was really just dying on the vine. She couldn't, I did, I did things to show love. I didn't feel love.

That was the big difference for me. So anytime you would ask me if I love my wife, I'd say absolutely, I love my wife, I do this, I do that in my head, I'm saying I do this, I do that, right. But if she ever tried to connect with me on an emotional level about something important, kids, her own heart, that sort of thing. It was a blank stare. There was there was nothing inside me that could connect with that. You look puzzled. Yeah, I did. And we had a counselor that put it this way.

He said, you know, a woman wants to look in your eyes and see her reflection. Yeah. Oh, wow. That's a good statement.

Yeah. And she never saw that. Because I, it wasn't available to me. It was like, I use the illustration in the book, it's like having a piece of equipment dropped off at your door. And no instructions, nothing. It's just this nice piece of equipment. And you're supposed to use it without any way of knowing what it's for, what it's supposed to do, that sort of thing.

You've got the piece of equipment, you own the piece of equipment, you don't know what to do with it. And that's sort of how I felt after looking back on how I was. So we have a mutual friend, Matt, who you call Matt in the book. So you're not asking him at all, but hey, Matt, hope you're doing well.

I call him a velvet hammer. Yeah. Okay.

And that's the point. I was going to ask you, what did, what role did Matt play in saying, Hey, Jim, you could see this a little differently. Matt's one of those kinds of guys that he's able to compartmentalize.

Okay. And he's able to get things done, but he also has very, very clear relational connection with Lisa, his wife, incredible. As I walked alongside him for years to watch their relationship.

They've been on broadcast. I learned. Yeah. I learned a lot from Matt, but Matt and I were meeting weekly. I was going through a divorce at the time from my first wife and we met every week just so I could survive. And she was the one a moment ago, you're talking about who struggled with your lack of connection. Eventually it was too much for her.

She couldn't, she couldn't live with it. Just that space of that lack of emotional connection. Yeah.

Lack of any feeling of love or shouldn't feel needed. That sort of thing. Lots of lots of things came out in the end, but anyway, we met for coffee and Matt sat right across the coffee table from me and I was normal jovial, happy guy, good space, comfortable space. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, I'm, I'm normally pretty happy. And, and to put it lightly, Matt basically took his granite finger and drove it right into my heart. And he said, what were some of the things he said that really made that impact?

He said, Jim you know what? You don't love me. You don't care about me. Wow. Yeah.

Okay. I mean, we'd been friends for three or four years by this time. And he said, you don't care about me.

As a matter of fact, you could walk out that coffee shop door and never contact me again and never probably think of me again and not miss me and go on with your life. And this was the guy, one of the guys I considered one of my best friends. Wow. Okay. And he's sitting across the table from me telling me, you are, you've got a problem. Let me, let me flesh this out a little bit because for the guys listening, particularly who might fall in this space, we're, I'll just throw myself in there for some odd reason, but help me understand that disconnection.

I mean, what was he noticing in you? That's a bold thing for somebody, a friend to say. It is. It is.

It was. So what was he observing about your actions, your attitude, your words? Why was he convinced, like your first wife, Jim Turner has a problem connecting with his emotions? What was he observing?

Yeah, good question. I, I was disconnected enough not to pursue that at the time, but I think what he was observing was my inability to really be transparent with him. Inability to connect with my own emotions, to be able to say, this is the way I'm feeling about something. Because I was always on the surface. I was a happy guy. I didn't have to worry about emotions. So you can stay pretty happy when you're not worried about emotions. Or getting involved in, you know, the deep conversations that lead to distress and pain and that sort of thing.

I didn't do that. Jim, at one level was Matt saying, and you never ask about me, Matt, it's always, we don't go to the places I'm feeling? Certainly part of that, because I can tell you Matt was a very emotionally healthy guy. He can go to those places.

As a matter of fact, Matt would say, he's kind of, he gets kind of dark sometimes. And now I can go there with him. But he saw that I couldn't go there with him.

I was just a sort of persona, like we had talked about before the broadcast that you put on the face and you're a happy-go-lucky guy. But I did it because I couldn't get to the emotions that other people understand as real. You know, I couldn't, I couldn't weep with you. I couldn't be the kind of guy that could come alongside you and really share in a great triumph or a really low time. Yeah, let me ask you in that context then, were there things that happened to you?

I mean, listen, vulnerability pays off here. So for me, being an orphan kid, you know my brother's story, you know my story, probably. You know, it was, you had to cope.

I mean, there's no options. You know, mom died at nine, dad's gone. I'm back with him for a year. Then he dies when I was 11.

I'm living with my brother. And so for me, there's a coping mechanism there that I feel good when I'm on the move, moving towards something. I don't really like sitting in my pain. Now, I process that as a good thing, as a Christian thing. I don't have to sit here in my fear, my overload.

I don't think Jean would see it that way. She wants to grieve with me. I don't like grieving.

I want to keep moving. That was me. Yeah. Oh, good.

Thank you for that diagnosis. For me, it puts me in this constant problem now about, okay, am I being healthy by moving on and being kind of joyful and happy? That's a fruit of the Spirit, isn't joy part of the Spirit?

And am I wrong for doing that? Or do I need to sit back here and kind of be contemplative and go, wow, I had a bummer of a childhood. I'm going to cry about that for a while. I don't think we wallow in the things that happened in the past.

We get past those. But the things that are happening now that grieve us, right? The things that, I mean, my wife and I now, I remarried, and we have 10 kids combined. Yeah. So there's a lot going on in their lives that cause us to grieve, to rejoice, to all have all kinds of the whole gamut of emotions, which if I was still that disconnected man that I write about, I'd go to work every day, do my thing, come home, provide, and I'd sort of be done.

I'd check out, right? And I couldn't be with my wife and kids and be in the moment, so to speak, with their emotions. But now I can. I can sit down with them and talk about that and make sure that I hear them because before they'd look at me and say, Dad, you're not even hearing me. Well, that's interesting that there's a consistency with what you experienced. I don't know that I have felt that. I mean, most of the people I know say, oh, you feel pretty connected, if that comes up. My boys would say, no, you feel you're connected, Dad.

So I don't... In terms of processing that, I'm trying to play the every man here because of all the listeners we've got. And some guys are going, okay, I am the disconnected guy. And maybe like for me, it's not a perfect spot on a continuum. You may have some attributes that you are connecting on, but generally, particularly if your spouse is saying, I don't feel connected, that's probably a time to go, okay, what is happening?

What's the assessment? In that regard, when it comes to that husband and wife connection and communication, especially if a man's feeling like he's connecting, but the wife does not, how do you do that assessment? Well, that's the tough part is because the way I define the disconnected man is he's unaware that he is emotionally- And that's frustrating to his wife.

And relationally unavailable, unaware. So he thinks everything's great. I thought my marriage was great until it ended.

Wow. Because I was doing everything I was supposed to do. I was so focused on doing things.

That's one of the points that I touched on before, but disconnected men do things, they do love, they don't feel love. And that's the big clue for me is that it didn't go past the surface for me. And you had asked earlier and I didn't answer it, but thinking about how I got there is that, and your story is pretty extreme, I think, maybe not extreme, but pretty tough. I grew up in a great home. My parents loved me. I knew they loved me. They never told me they loved me. And they never touched me or hugged me. That's big.

Yeah. But I knew they loved me. There was never a doubt in my mind. So I grew up thinking, well, you don't really need to be real touchy feely, lovey dovey in order to know that there's love. And maybe that played into, okay, it didn't happen in my house.

I don't need that. And so I lived without it. Or you may not even think about it.

It's just what it was and how it was modeled to you. And this is the way life runs. Exactly.

But then when you run into someone that you marry... They want more. Yeah. They really want to know you. And they really want to have that constant sense that they're needed, that they're loved, that they're cherished.

I mean... And that they're safe. Yeah. That's another big one that we learned from our Hope Restored connections.

Yeah. Talk us through... And to your credit, that vulnerability that sounds like wasn't there before, you now have put it in a book about you and your first wife's difficulties. But talk us through the unraveling of your first marriage and the reaction you had when your wife decided to seek a divorce. Well, again, I was thinking everything was fine. We're good. You said, I love you at the altar.

Yeah. Well, I actually told her I loved her all the time. I mean, I expressed it verbally. I provided for the family.

I did things. She never felt cherished by me. She only felt like I was this person going about the perimeters of her life, doing things for her, but never being one with her. Boy, that's big.

That is really big. You also described the way she described what it felt like with physical intimacy. Yeah. She said, I'm just being used, just used. And so when that came out, I was devastated. I couldn't grasp that. And that's one of the things where I say in the book that men have to feel their wives pain in order to get past disconnectedness to connectedness.

That's a big statement. I mean, it is a jaw dropping moment for you, I'm sure. And unfortunately it came very late in your marriage to her. You also described in the book something called heart walks, which I like with the last few minutes here. I want to get to the positive side of it, how we can recognize our disconnectedness and things we can do to connect.

And hopefully our wives will be kind toward us and give us a little bit of growth and time to learn and those things. But what's this heart walk that you talk? Yeah, well, it's not taking your wife out for a walk and pretending to hear what she has to say.

It's actually getting yourself on a point. And this is a tough point for a disconnected man to get to. It's almost after the point where the Holy Spirit has taken him by the shoulders and said, this is you.

Okay. And most men don't get here until the Holy Spirit comes down and puts the finger on it and says, this is you. And if the Holy Spirit's not doing that for a guy, okay, then it's not his time.

Right. But taking your wife's heart on a walk is feeling her pain and feeling her emptiness, feeling her lack of love, feeling unneeded, entering into that sort of pain and letting those swords pierce our hearts. And that's what I mean by taking your wife's heart on a walk, is really getting in there and feeling what she feels. Jim, how does a man go from recognizing or being forced to recognize that he's emotionally disconnected to that kind of a willingness and desire? The master's program. The master's program.

Well, yeah. What are the steps in between that? Well, number one, you've got to have a circle of relational, emotional, godly men that you meet with on a regular basis. I mean, guys who have great relationships with their wives, you can see it. Their wives are fulfilled, happy in that relationship.

That's the first thing. And most guys just isolate. They don't get with guys or they do sports or whatever they do, right?

And they don't talk about these things. You have to intentionally find guys that will have intentional conversations that aren't necessarily that comfortable. But if you find the right guys and you ask the Lord for these guys, but if you find the right guys, they can go there with you. And they have to teach you. I had to be taught.

It didn't just come to me. I'm still learning. But these guys had to teach me and I met with four different guys every week for about a year. And I gave them complete permission to speak into my life. The other thing I did is I had adult children and I gave them... Oh, yeah, that's good. I gave them... They know you best. Yeah.

But I gave them permission to speak it, to say anything they needed to to me and my daughters, especially very emotionally connected, very sensitive, very able to tell where I was. And you would say you married again and you've been married for how long? We've been married nine years.

Yeah. And you're saying, you know, the irony is that the benefit of your valley is now showing itself in your second marriage. I call my wife and I an emulsion. We really are. It is everything I ever dreamed that marriage could be. And at one time, I have all the regrets of my first failure. But I have this relationship that I can only say is God fulfilling his promise to restore, to rebuild, to rejuvenate, to do all the things God says he will do if we will just humble ourselves and trust him to do them.

He's faithful. Right. You know, and I've experienced that in our lives right now with 10 kids and all that chaos, all the things we've got going on.

We run a business with some of the kids and lots of different things going on. It is still so full and so rich and so amazingly good that I can only say praise be to God. Yeah. Well, that is well said.

That should be motivation to get the book right then. And I know I can't tell you the percentage, but it's a high percentage of men that are living in this place. It's something I battle with. I hope I've been vulnerable in that.

You can tell me later, guys. But I mean, it is. It's part of our predisposition.

It's not what we can rely upon because God calls us to be more. I had a great friend, Randy, and he may be listening. Randy and I so thank you for this. And he really challenged me. He said, you know what? You talk about being that orphan kid. Didn't God take care of that for you?

Why do you refer to that? He's healed bad in your life. Why don't you be what you need to be for your spouse for Jean? Phew.

That was a two by four. And you know, maybe some days I'm doing better than other days and then other days I'm not. And that's part of the patience that you talk about for the spouse to hold on. I got to tell you that there are two kinds of folks that get really angry when they read the book. The woman who said, who, who reads you are the best person to teach your disconnected man how to connect. And they read that I've got to teach him. He's supposed to be relational, right? I mean that they have an expectation for men to be relational because they're married, right? There's that everything they've ever learned, especially in the church was, Hey, I'm the bride. Like Jesus communicates with the bride.

Jesus holds the bride close. That's not my guy. And you're telling me I've got to teach him now. That's one of the hardest things. That's one of the things that makes women angry. And one of the things that makes men angry is that what we talked about before is that, um, you're walking in disobedience and either I had a guy go off on me when he read that in, in the worst way. Yeah.

Kind of proving the point, right? Yeah. If we hadn't been on the phone, I think he would have struck me. I think he would have punched me.

I really do. He's got some issues. He was really angry.

Um, yeah, he didn't finish reading the book and I have no idea what happened to him. But anyway, well, I mean, that's in part how some guys will respond and they do. Yeah. Jim, this has been awesome. The disconnected man, breaking down walls and restoring intimacy with him. That's the goal. And look at the, the fruit that comes from a great intimate relationship with your spouse, family and friends.

Yeah. Well, you've done it. You've come from the pit and to the mountain top. So well done. And, uh, it's a bit awe inspiring that you could do it and it gives everybody else hope.

Every other man hope that it can be done. So thanks for that. It's a really good to meet you. Thanks for coming. Yeah. Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

And we need to get this into your hands, whether you're the spouse, the woman married to that man, or the man that has these issues of being disconnected, get in touch with us. If you can make a gift of any amount, we'll send it as our way of saying, thank you. If you can make that commitment monthly, that's great. That's how Jean and I support focus. It's how John and Dina support focus.

It doesn't, you know, 20 bucks a month is great. Um, you know, you start looking at the good that's being done. I I'm excited about focus.

Even if I wasn't here, I'd be supporting focus because it just does so much and I get to see it inside. And I have great confidence in the team here and what they can do for the kingdom with your help. So consider it, think about joining us and again, get a copy of this great resource.

Yeah. And one of the great things that our donor community does is provide, uh, access to caring Christian counselors. And so I know we've touched on some, uh, some matters that might be really difficult for you. Call us and we'll schedule a time for one of those counselors to give you a call back. And if you're one of those lone ranger guys and you don't have anybody start with a phone call to us, we can help you at least kind of assess the situation and move on our number to donate, to request the book, the disconnected man, or to, uh, set up a counseling time is a 800, the letter a and the word family 800-232-6459. And we've got full detail about all these resources and opportunities to donate in the show notes.

Well, thanks for listening to focus on the family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back next time as we once again, help you and your family thrive in Christ. God wants true disciples. One's that think like him, talk like him, walk like him, disciples that bring Shalom to the chaos of this world. Pursue that path with the RVL discipleship series. Bible scholar Ray Vanderlaan will give you the tools to understand the Bible more deeply and inspire you to be a passionate follower of Christ. Watch the first episode at rvldiscipleship.com.