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059 | Marriage Episode 4: On Fighting Well
488 Plays3 years ago
How do we communicate well when emotions are running high?
Phy and Josh discuss their history of dysfunctional communication and cycles of fighting, and how addressing the underlying emotions helped them reach peace.
They also talk about the benefits of marriage counseling and why counseling isn't just for crisis situations.
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Transcript
Introduction by Felicia Masonheimer
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Verity. I'm your host, Felicia Masonheimer, an author, speaker, and Bible teacher. This podcast will help you embrace the history and depth of the Christian faith, ask questions, seek answers, and devote yourself to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ. You don't have to settle for watered-down Christian teaching. And if you're ready to go deeper, God is just as ready to take you there. This is Verity, where every woman is a theologian.
00:00:30
Speaker
Welcome back to Verity podcast, you guys.
Marriage Insights from Felicia and Josh
00:00:33
Speaker
We are in the middle of our honest marriage series, and myself and my husband, Josh, are both here sharing a real life look into our relationship, our story, and applying scripture to it. And hopefully by sharing our story and what we've learned in our eight years almost of being married, some of you are encouraged and perhaps are able to implement some of the things that have worked for us in your own relationship.
00:01:00
Speaker
Today's episode is about fighting. Not just any fighting, but good fighting. Yes. We want to be able to fight well and to communicate through the disagreements that we have. And so the passage that we're going to be reading from today is Colossians 12.
00:01:20
Speaker
through fourteen, which says, Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another, and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other, as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.
00:01:48
Speaker
So this passage gives us a glimpse of what Christians are called to exude as Christian behavior. But what we know most of all is that this behavior is rooted
00:02:04
Speaker
in an identity in Christ. So the very first verse says, you are God's chosen ones, holy and beloved. And that identity undergirds all of these spirit-led behaviors. And of course, if they're called of all Christians, that means they're called of us in marriage too. So we
Navigating Marital Conflicts with Christian Teachings
00:02:24
Speaker
wanted to talk in this episode, like Josh said, about fighting well. And we kind of have a history of fighting, don't we?
00:02:32
Speaker
Yeah, we do. I think, you know, starting out, you were always so fiery and, you know, I kind of grew confidence over time and sometimes I let things being a passive person boil up and the pot would boil over. Which was never a good situation for anybody, but how would you describe fighting for us in the earlier years?
00:03:02
Speaker
I said sorry a lot. You did say sorry a lot. Were you truly sorry? No, but usually ended the fight. That's a good example, though, that you were not actually dealing with the conflict. You were just trying to escape it by taking responsibility for it. Unfortunately, it would usually become another arrow in the quiver. What do you mean by that? Like ammunition for later, because it was never resolved.
00:03:32
Speaker
you know, rear its head later on. Right. And so I always felt like, Oh, that fight was resolved, but moving on, moving on, but you would hold a grudge and bring it back later, which, you know, felt to me like a betrayal. And like, I thought we already dealt with this. Why is this being brought up again? You said that it was over.
00:03:53
Speaker
And so it would create this cycle where you couldn't trust the other person. You know, whether you felt like I didn't take responsibility for things, I felt like you held grudges and didn't forgive. It really created layer upon layer of a history of distrust kind of. Yeah, definitely. And like, I think the biggest thing was like a lack of honesty.
00:04:23
Speaker
with one another and even with ourselves, like just in communication and like being honest about how we feel. And also I guess some humility on one part or the other. Yeah. I think a lot of people when they hear you say that are probably going to be like, Oh, if I was honest,
00:04:47
Speaker
I would be super hurtful and I don't want to hurt them and I don't want to have like that conflict so I just don't deal with it. I think when you let the pot simmer and then you boil over, that's when you do more damage.
Communication and Reconciliation Techniques
00:05:05
Speaker
because then you are angry and you're saying it hurtfully because you've just like stewed on it. And whereas like if it was dealt with initially, it would have been like at least more constructive. Yeah, that's true. I know that when we were in the middle of this pattern,
00:05:30
Speaker
I don't think what we realized was that in dealing with this and in fighting well, communicating through it, it's going to get worse before it's going to get better. Like you have to be okay with feeling really uncomfortable and making them upset by being honest in order to actually communicate your needs and hear theirs. Because I do see a bit of a trend on social media now where, you know, I think there's a good side of it. Like we're becoming aware of
00:05:59
Speaker
patterns of communication that are really unhealthy, but we're also becoming super selfish in our communication where it's like, well, if you don't say it to me exactly this way, then I don't have to listen to you. Or if you don't communicate honestly in a way that appeals to my love language personality, I don't have to listen to you. And that's just not how it works in the body of Christ.
00:06:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's like you're like if you're not seen the way that you feel you need to be seen, then you can stop trying. Yeah, I think early on for us when we were working on this, we would just like just kind of duke it out. And, you know, we get to the point where we're just like, well, you know, I went like this way and like, well, I went like that way, too. Fine, fine. And it's like, wait.
00:06:50
Speaker
We're wearing an agreement on this. Okay. Yes. I do remember that when we were, we would like fight and fight and fight and fight and fight. And I would say the first couple of years, you didn't always, you didn't like the conflict. So you would say, I'm sorry. And then just like,
00:07:07
Speaker
leave or end the conversation, you wouldn't leave leave, but you'd be like, can we talk about this later or something. And it wasn't actually resolved. And then as you grew in your faith, and as a person, you would push back more and be more honest in our fights.
00:07:26
Speaker
I think, and that's when you started to actually duke it out more with me. I am not afraid of conflict, so it's not difficult for me to fight, but you didn't like it. And so as you grew in strength, I think you were able to actually stand up to the conflict more, but it was still uncomfortable.
00:07:48
Speaker
Yeah. And we didn't always come to resolution, but we knew that one another's sides were heard and we could agree to disagree. Right. And be like, well, what can I do?
00:08:02
Speaker
Like, what do you want? What are you hoping for? It's not just like lingering there. It's like, OK, well, you know, maybe we can revisit this later. But like, you know, I know where you stand and you know where I stand. So, yeah, like that's at least not going to like fester.
00:08:19
Speaker
Yeah, and then we did try towards, so this is the early years, it was pretty unhealthy. I would say years two, three, four were really rough. But then as we got towards the, I would say the middle years closer to where we are, moving towards where we are now, we started to kind of have that, do you remember that unspoken rule where we would have to hug after our fights?
00:08:44
Speaker
Oh, yeah. That lasted for a little bit at least. I think it lasted, I remember it being for a pretty long time. Like we would fight and then try to hug each other at the end of the fight just as a way of like reconnecting with each other. And I understand that wouldn't necessarily work for every person, but like I'm not a physical touch person, but it did help me feel like, OK, we are actually reconciled. Yeah.
00:09:13
Speaker
Even if we're still working through the emotions. I think too, like when I hugged you, when you were upset, like it cut through the anger and brought out the true emotion underneath. That's very true. Which was often.
00:09:29
Speaker
you know, fear or grief. Yeah, that's that's a good point. Because I think anger for me, which we're going to talk about in a second, our counselor helped us identify the underlying emotion behind the initial emotion. And that's not something that we knew how to do until we started seeing a marriage counselor, which we're going to talk about in the second half of this episode.
00:09:54
Speaker
And that really helped me see like Felicia, when you come off super angry at Josh, you're actually pushing him away and he's not hearing you as easily. You're making it hard for him to listen to you. And that was helpful to me, even though anger is the emotion that I'm most comfortable with, it doesn't accomplish the righteousness of God and it doesn't accomplish a unified marriage. It also doesn't help you to be heard. Right.
00:10:23
Speaker
Right. But you, when you would use affection to cut through the anger, it actually did usually make our fights more productive, which was a huge step for you because I mean, who wants to move towards.
00:10:36
Speaker
a cornered badger. Josh called me that once. Yes, it is a little bit true. Since we're still talking about fighting, I want to talk about leaving a fight. One of the things both of us were familiar with was experience with family or extended family.
00:11:06
Speaker
leaving or abandoning a person mid conflict, like leaving completely, walking out the door, driving away, or just refusing to engage with the conflict. And I think we're both pretty triggered by that experience. And so it's something that we knew when we got married, even though we were not super healthy in many ways, we knew we did not want to be a spouse who walked away from a fight.
00:11:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think I do remember like when we were in college, there was one time we were working out together and I was just like, if I didn't just like take a break and cool off, I would have said something that would have left some scars. So there was that moment, but like after that happened, like we talked about it and.
00:11:59
Speaker
We're kind of like, okay, we're not going to do that. We can be open and honest with each other and come to a resolution. I remember a couple years later when we were in early marriage fighting, you just said that to me. You said, I have to walk away.
00:12:18
Speaker
because I'm gonna say something I regret. But you told me you were walking away. And that was the difference was you didn't just up and walk away and ignore me. And there was another time in the first year or two when I'm the one who literally walked out the door and drove away.
00:12:34
Speaker
And when I got back, you said like, this is exactly what we promised we wouldn't do. Like you can't just leave a fight like this. Like you can't just walk away without telling me where you're going. And I never did it again. And so since that first year,
00:12:53
Speaker
I think almost every fight I can remember, we've seen it through to the end and no one is abandoning the other. And I think that even if you are, again, we're not marriage counselors, this is just postulation, but if you can at least just say, Hey, I am too emotional to have this conversation right now. I want to talk about this with you.
00:13:19
Speaker
I'm going to leave the room, but it's not because I'm abandoning you. Like even just saying that, I think it's just walking away is kind of saying like the person isn't worth your time. I'm done with you. Like you're choosing on your terms. I've had enough. We're done. You are just choosing for the both of you that the conversation isn't going to be finished.
00:13:44
Speaker
It's a like a power move is what it is. Like a control taking control of the conversation. But it's also like huge disrespect because you're saying like the other person doesn't have a right.
00:13:57
Speaker
Yeah, I don't have to listen to you anymore. It is. It's disrespectful and it's contemptuous, which I read in a marriage book. I don't remember who said it, but they said that contempt is the death now of a relationship when there's contempt for the other person, just like this
00:14:17
Speaker
absolute distaste for them. That's the first sign that something is seriously wrong. And I think the more that a couple is okay with that, just walking away and abandoning the other person mid fight, the more opportunity there is for that contempt to grow because the person who's left behind is left feeling like I don't matter. And the person who left might be, you know, frustrated for valid reasons, but
00:14:44
Speaker
They're showing disrespect to the other person by just leaving them standing there. It also creates a pattern of just like disconnecting when you don't want to deal with something. And so you're constantly just putting a wall up.
00:15:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. Which is why, to circle back to what I was saying about the social media thing, I think we have to just be so careful when we're consuming secular content about communication that we remember that all of it has to be filtered through the selflessness of scripture.
00:15:23
Speaker
that yes, it's really important that you be heard and you should be valued. And if your husband or wife is not doing that, you probably need to get a counselor or mediator to get to the root of it. But you also have to remember that you married a sinner and you should set your expectations accordingly. And I'm not talking about
00:15:47
Speaker
abusers. I'm talking about your average run of the mill marriage where you're married to a sinner. I mean, I feel like if your expectation is they need to constantly like pay perfect attention to me, the way I see these like things that circulate on Instagram, these quotes and stuff, if so and so doesn't do X, Y, and Z, they're not worth your time. Well, you know,
00:16:09
Speaker
I don't do that to other people. I fail at making people feel listened to and valued and I need to do better at that. So I think there's a measure of humility like this passage in Colossians says, or it says, put on compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another. And that's kind of the basis of fighting well.
00:16:33
Speaker
It's assuming that you're going to do things that need to be born with.
Announcement of New Marriage Book
00:16:40
Speaker
If you're listening to this marriage series, there's a good chance that you or someone you love is married. And that's fantastic because on December 7th,
00:16:50
Speaker
my brand new co-authored marriage book is launching into the world. It's called The Flirtation Experiment. And if that title intrigues you, good, because I can't wait for wives to pick this book up and be encouraged and equipped to pursue their husbands in ways they maybe never expected to do so.
00:17:12
Speaker
When I wrote this book, I was looking back on a year when I was really struggling to cultivate a relationship with Josh. I felt lonely, I felt disconnected, and I realized that I could wait for him to change it or I could make the change. And so I made a list of 30 flirtations
00:17:32
Speaker
all different kinds of ways to show him that I loved him. And through this experiment, I found that I actually was changed. I co-authored this book with my friend, Lisa Jacobson, who's been married 28 years to my eight years. And we alternate chapters showing you the ideas that we used to cultivate an intimate and fun, romantic and flirtatious marriage.
00:17:56
Speaker
You can pre-order the book now anywhere books are sold from Amazon to Barnes and Noble to Christian book, or you can go to the flirtationexperiment.com to get two free chapters in the introduction and to be notified when the book launches. I hope you guys will grab it. We have some awesome bonuses for those who pre-order and I'm excited to get this book into your hands. As we began to like work on, you know, communicating better and all, I did actually see like
00:18:27
Speaker
There was kind of a pivotal time where you were a little more raw with your emotions and like not just anger, but just, you know, showing some of the underlying emotions. And like you did like begin to like start saying you were sorry and you were like the first person to say sorry. And why is that significant?
00:18:54
Speaker
because I was always the first or only person to say it previously for several years. Yes, you often initiated the apology. And I would say I'm sorry, but I would say I was sorry after he first said he was sorry.
00:19:13
Speaker
Yeah, or there was a big big explanation for why I was sorry. But I definitely saw growth through that for you. And I think like it kind of coincided with your gratitude growth that you did and just thinking more positively. And it helped with your humility and
00:19:42
Speaker
when you were wrong to own it. I think part of that was as I was growing in my faith and if you haven't listened to I think in our first episode of this series we talk a little bit about like spiritual growth and where you're at spiritually when you get married but I knew more intellectually but spiritually I think I
00:20:07
Speaker
I had a lot of immaturity because I was still holding on to so much anger and so much just bitterness and how I operated in the world and criticism of myself and others. And so that came through in that that first emotion of being angry. And so as the Lord worked on that, I was able to be more honest and more safe with other emotions with you and feel safe to show them instead of just initially reverting to like
00:20:36
Speaker
anger or criticism. Yeah. Because you previously felt like having emotions was weakness. Yes. Yeah. It felt like, well, if I show
00:20:51
Speaker
I cry or if I, you know, let down my guard, then I'll be taken advantage of or I'll be made fun of. So I have to be strong like all the time. But what that looked like was actually not strong, but hard, like not able to be vulnerable. So, yeah, you were a part of that. Like you made me feel safe to be vulnerable with you because when I was, you were very quick.
00:21:18
Speaker
to take me in, to hug me, to tell me that you loved me. I knew I was okay to be vulnerable with you. And that was a big part of why that changed, I think. Yeah. Although part of me started to feel like, oh, this isn't fair.
00:21:34
Speaker
She's crying. How can I? I just feel like the bad guy again. Well, like if you like, that's true because you would hug me like after a fight, I start to cry. And then maybe the fight wouldn't like your side of the fight wouldn't be completely resolved because you didn't want to bring it up because I was crying.
00:21:53
Speaker
But
Marriage Counseling: Breaking Negative Cycles
00:21:54
Speaker
I think this brings us to a good point in this conversation, which is around year five, we started to see a marriage counselor and we saw her specifically for this reason. We just wanted like a maintenance plan, some preventative maintenance. We're here to get our tires changed. We basically told her
00:22:20
Speaker
We're not in crisis. We're not getting a divorce, but we cannot seem to get out of this cycle of just like whenever we kind of
00:22:33
Speaker
we would bond over stressful times. And so when times were easy, we would get bored and start to fight. Yeah. Which is so, so strange to me that that's us, but it really is something else we haven't come. Yeah.
00:22:51
Speaker
Yeah, we would get super irritated about dumb things. Like we fought over how to fry an egg and how to make sure, you know, like you'd make an egg for somebody, you think they'd be grateful, but instead I was like, no, I wanted it fried. Or he'd be like, I wanted it fried, but we had two different definitions of a fried egg. And so we could never make each other the eggs the way the other wanted.
00:23:13
Speaker
It's like the steak was too chewy. The lunch meat was too deli. Yeah, it was such dumb things that we would argue about because we didn't have like that unifying project to both throw our weight behind. So I started looking around for a counselor because we kept going in this cycle and we looked for a licensed counselor who was also a believer.
00:23:42
Speaker
That was important to us because we knew that we wanted her to have this professional education and experience, but we also wanted someone who would understand just how important our faith is to us and could understand the biblical basis for our marriage. The Bible does have some solutions in it.
00:24:04
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And God invented science. So together, it works really well. So we're an example of a couple that sought out counseling, not because everything was, you know, going down the tubes, but because we wanted to improve our communication. And I think four couples should just be open to, to doing that, just to learn how to communicate better.
00:24:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think she was very insightful into like, she's very good with body language. So whenever one of us would say something, she'd notice the other person twitch or something. She's so good. She's like, so why did you cross your hands when he said that? She always saw it. I didn't even know. Why does this make you feel defensive? She's like, how did you know I felt defensive? Well, your face.
00:24:59
Speaker
So what was really helpful is she's helping us work through just supporting one another in our fears and potential baggage that's kind of putting us at a predisposition for reacting specific ways in a fight and just kind of going to the root of the issue of why we keep reverting to the state
00:25:29
Speaker
Yeah, she had us kind of work through this cycle of communication that we had where Josh would say something like was bothering him and I would get defensive and angry. So then he would get defensive. And then at that point, it's just, you know, this spiral and
00:25:49
Speaker
What she had us use when we were first, we did a eight week intensive session with her. And then we did like once a month. Now it's more like once every three months, once a month, we would see her and just work through anything we were recently struggling with. And so during that intensive period, she had us, do you remember the emotions chart?
00:26:12
Speaker
Yeah. I'm like, my emotion isn't on here. I still remember. He was holding the emotion chart and he's like, my emotion is not on this chart. I was like, I don't know. People of my personality type are reputedly disconnected from their emotions because emotions get in the way.
00:26:33
Speaker
You're like, this is a lot of emotions I'm looking at. This is so many emotions because emotions are something I feel very, very deeply. So I will turn them off temporarily to to get done what needs to get done to, you know, I have to turn my emotions off oftentimes to do my work because people say really hurtful things. And so in order to work, I have to turn off my emotions to operate. But then you have to turn them back on.
00:27:00
Speaker
to love your spouse, to love your children, to love your neighbor. And so when she hands me an emotions chart, I'm like, I don't know. I guess this one. What does this one mean? You know, so but it was helpful because she was she was like, OK, I want you to look at the emotion that you feel. But then I want you to think about what's the underlying emotion. Yeah. And
00:27:25
Speaker
I mean, like what we were saying earlier, like you would get angry, but really you're like scared of, you know, something like going terribly wrong or not being taken care of. And so it exhibits itself in anger. Yeah. And for you, that like defensiveness
00:27:48
Speaker
And like he would often, instead of focusing on the issue at hand, he'd get into all of these really minor details that were unrelated to the issue to like explain. And I would say that's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about that. We're talking about this issue over here, but you were trying to basically defend yourself from being falsely accused.
00:28:15
Speaker
And we're very sensitive to being falsely accused. And so she helped us work through like, where did those fears come from in your childhood? And how can you be sensitive to those things going forward so that when you do fight, you fight away from the hot words? Yeah, or triggers. Yeah, like, or try to, you know, express that you hear them. Yeah, be supportive. Right. So
00:28:44
Speaker
What would, what would you, how would you give counseling five stars?
00:28:49
Speaker
Yeah, our experience has been great. Yeah, I would just encourage couples who maybe think like, well, we're not in crisis. So we don't need counseling or people only go to counseling. If they're about to get divorced, I would just really encourage you to reframe that because biblically seeking counsel and wisdom is something that is encouraged. It's encouraged to ask for input from somebody who has knowledge in that area. It's not something you, I mean, if you were
00:29:15
Speaker
You're like, I'm not going to get a financial advisor until I'm about to go into bankruptcy. Everyone would say, that's insane. You should be doing that way earlier. I was just going to say, it shouldn't be viewed as a last resort. Right.
00:29:29
Speaker
And you shouldn't feel like once you're in counseling, like you're at the end, you know? Right. And if people are weird, I mean, when we first started going to counseling, we did have a few people comment like, what's wrong? And we
Encouragement to Seek Counseling Early
00:29:44
Speaker
just said, nothing's wrong. We just want to learn to communicate better. And, and it has, it's helped so, so, so much to communicate better and learn how to better.
00:29:57
Speaker
love one another, which is the whole point of this Colossians passage. Well, we hope you guys that this was an encouraging episode or at least gave you some things to think about in your own relationships. We kind of hope that husbands and wives will listen to these episodes together and discuss them together because having both Josh and myself here, I hope makes more men comfortable with Verity podcast, which is a woman dominated listenership if we're being real.
00:30:26
Speaker
So we're grateful for you listening. We hope that maybe this resonated with some of you and you feel a little bit less alone in your own patterns of fighting in your marriage and that you get the help you need no matter what it takes.
Connect with Felicia for More Discussions
00:30:39
Speaker
Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Verity. You can connect with fellow listeners by following me on Instagram at Felicia Masonheimer or on our Facebook page by the same name. Also visit FeliciaMasonheimer.com for links to each episode and the show notes.