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Losing Is the New Winning: Choosing Love Over Being Right
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Why is it so hard to stay connected when conflict shows up? For most of us, the moment tension rises, we slip into debate mode — fighting for the win instead of fighting for the relationship. In this episode, Wendy and Chris get honest about what that looks like in their own marriage, and what it takes to choose connection instead.
They share stories from their early years together — when Saturday morning chores, unspoken expectations, and clashing habits revealed something much deeper: the longing to be seen, loved, and secure. Along the way, they name how family of origin, formative wounds, and even the wiring of our brains set us up to repeat old patterns, and how easy it is to cling to being “right” when what we really want is to be close. (Ever had an argument where the real fight wasn’t about the dishes? Yeah, us too.)
At the heart of the conversation is a crucial distinction: coercion vs. connection. Coercion may look like control, persuasion, or even righteousness — but love rooted in Christ makes room for freedom. It bears with one another in humility, gentleness, patience, and forgiveness, just as Ephesians 4:2 and Colossians 3:13 call us to.
This isn’t about avoiding conflict or pretending differences don’t matter. It’s about moving from debate to dialogue, from certainty to curiosity, and from control to trust. Honest, funny, and deeply hopeful, this conversation is full of the kind of real-life wisdom y’all will recognize — the kind that just might change how you show up in your next argument.
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Transcript
Friendship Across Political Divides
00:00:05
Speaker
Hello and welcome back. Hi Chris. Hey there Wendy. Good afternoon. We had dinner with some friends couple weeks ago and the husband had something really interesting he was telling us.
From Debate to Dialogue
00:00:21
Speaker
i don't know if you remember this, but he was saying that he has a friend in the city where he used to live. They've maintained contact and a friendship and they have found themselves over the years on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Yes. Particularly in the context of current day.
00:00:42
Speaker
happenings That is correct. Yes. And he had been telling me about this one time at church and was explaining how his purpose in trying to engage in this conversation had shifted away from, you know, I'm going to try to convince this guy.
00:00:57
Speaker
I think he's wrong. He's out to lunch. He's got a bunch of dumb ideas. I need to show him that my ideas are right. um He was saying had made a shift to trying to have conversations so that he could understand, yeah that he could, you know, understand where, where does this person get their belief from? What is it that's animating this thought? um and it it He framed it as they were learning to engage in dialogue rather than debate.
00:01:27
Speaker
Yeah. And the way he described it was like, we're going to put things on the table, but we're going to put them on the table as if they're objects or creatures or whatever. and and And we're going to be interested in like, what, huh? Where did that come from? What is it that leads you to believe that? um Let's pick them up. If something's put on the table, it's not, I'm going to chop it in half. going to show you it's stupid. It shouldn't be here.
00:01:49
Speaker
Rather, huh? Let's be interested. Let's look at this and see. what we can learn by
The Rightness Trap in Relationships
00:01:54
Speaker
talking about together. and And the interesting part is they've had a very sustained ability to stay in dialogue because of that shift. Like you don't hear a lot of people who can have good conversations these days across political divides. It happens in families too.
00:02:11
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it's a very, very mature way of relating. Yeah. And it made us think that this type of pitfall is there everywhere. It's in marriages, it's in friendships, it's families, particularly when you're dealing with adults, whether...
00:02:33
Speaker
adult children or other relatives in our extended families, but who's right and who's wrong? And do I have to tolerate or is my job to convince and persuade?
00:02:47
Speaker
And we just realized this is kind of an epidemic in relationships. It is. And i'm I'm even seeing it a lot. And so it's been on my mind a lot in my work as a mediator and my work with couples who are separating and divorcing and how that spirit, that instinct to prove what's right and that somebody has to be right and is right even endures often.
00:03:12
Speaker
for both people in a couple that's separating or or sometimes it's one, not other. And sometimes it's my client. They're still holding onto that even after they've decided this relationship is going to, is not going to, to stay.
00:03:25
Speaker
um But we still have to raise our kids together. We still have you know, handle some financial things together. it is fascinating to watch and listen as people are still very drawn. In fact, in some ways more drawn because they think,
00:03:38
Speaker
By coming into the legal arena, not necessarily the legal system, not necessarily going to court, but even in the negotiation context, there's still this, I'm going to prove that I'm right and I'm going to be vindicated.
Childhood's Role in Adult Interactions
00:03:51
Speaker
um And there are accusations of, well that's a lie. And there they go being deceptive again. It's really, really ingrained to want to find this you know position of justification and see see how terrible they are what I've always said. and And they're not necessarily wrong that the other person's terrible, but they're holding on to position.
00:04:12
Speaker
need for vindication, need for validation. And and and they have to, you know feel like they have to prove me. And I'm, as a meteor, I'm constantly saying, I have no power. You might convince me of something, but it doesn't mean anything. And that's so not really what I need you to do.
00:04:23
Speaker
um I want to understand what motivates you and what motivates them. So I can see if I can help you guys get to a place together, which is not unlike, I guess, what you do counseling couples sometimes too, right?
00:04:34
Speaker
ah Yeah. Trying to bring people together to restoration, redemption and love. um But it left me thinking, like, why do we get so caught up in having to be right?
00:04:52
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. um I know for me, I can relate to the idea of, you know, from a young age, I kind of thought my words were my means of power.
00:05:04
Speaker
There is an answer. There's a right way to be. There's a right way to behave. And, My parents click clearly did not find it and their marriage failed and it was kind of a train wreck and I was in the middle of it.
Family Dynamics and Marital Expectations
00:05:15
Speaker
But I somehow bought into, but there there is a right way out there to do it. There is a right way to be and doggone it, I'm going to find it. And I can kind of relate to, i was we were watching... Well, real quick before you move on, you right way to do marriage, a right way to be a man, a right way to make decisions. Kind of all of that.
00:05:38
Speaker
Definitely a right way to be in relationship, I think, is the main thing I picked up. of ah don't love your job so much. Don't work so hard that you neglect your family because that's the accusation I heard from my mom against the dad a lot.
00:05:53
Speaker
um Don't check out, disappear and be elsewhere and not be there. And I was, I guess, trained by mom my my mom to be sensitive and to listen and to give care And that from age 10 on after my parents split up, that was what a premium was put on in my house. It was me, my mom and sister.
00:06:14
Speaker
They were carrying a lot of emotions and understandably so. um And my role, it felt like, was to be caregiver to them and or let their emotions kind of reign. And I think I somewhere along the way, it became difficult for me to know what I felt.
00:06:32
Speaker
Okay. What my okay thoughts and feelings about something were in the emotional realm. Now I had lots of thoughts and I learned lots of trivia and useless knowledge and became a really yeah i'm smart brainiac kind of guy. because I was thinking some of the things you mentioned...
00:06:47
Speaker
you know, an observer might say, well, what's wrong with that? To be sensitive or to prioritize family over work. Where do you think the breakdown came for you?
00:06:59
Speaker
Part of the breakdown was running into situations where I thought, well, I mean, I'm doing the right thing. I've read the book. I read the book on marriage. I've read the book on this or that.
00:07:10
Speaker
I know how to do it, but it wasn't working. okay It didn't deliver what I thought it was going to deliver. The being right didn't come with a guarantee.
00:07:21
Speaker
That's right. And it didn't, it both, I would say, operated on a relational level, like as between us and then just on a how I engage with the world level. I mean, I was, it's amazing that you were attracted to me and and we got a relationship, but I was kind of know-it-all and I did value thinking I was the smartest person in the room.
00:07:41
Speaker
So I would dazzle with my, you know, my knowledge of trivia or facts or whatever, my logical reasoning. So I put a lot in that, but then graphed that onto a relationship and So I wasn't just like, you know, computer brainiac person. I want to get all the right answers to things.
00:07:56
Speaker
It was, I'm going to do this right in relationships too. And that made it, um I would imagine difficult to be in relationship with me sometimes to speak to that. Well, I mean, i definitely, so we didn't go to school together. Right. We went to youth group together.
00:08:12
Speaker
So I didn't know that side of you in the classroom that had to excel. Right. But I knew the part of you that needed to know the answer to the thing. Yes.
00:08:27
Speaker
um And it was off putting to me. Partly, I think, because i never thought I knew the right answer to the thing. And so it made me feel inferior.
00:08:41
Speaker
But I also had had a lot of formative experiences where other people had used their knowledge as power over me. yeah And so I think i went more the route of playful, not flighty as in an airhead. That's not how I carried myself, but more playful, like, oh, I don't know. Does it really matter?
00:09:05
Speaker
And so I think that did that. We bumped up against each other in that way. Yeah, because you were super intelligent, very thoughtful, but you were you had a whole different approach to, you know,
00:09:17
Speaker
um winning the game of grades and testing and all that. Right. Right. It was not a game worth playing. Now you liked, ah you've got that sort of competitive side. I think you it comes out some playing games where you like to sort of, you know, one up or whatever.
00:09:32
Speaker
Right. But when you bring this, I bring it to our relationship when we would have arguments as a young couple and we didn't have any, that's the other thing. We went from being best friends to dating And dating long distance. And we never had any normal, we're together in the same place. Right.
00:09:49
Speaker
um So we didn't have to do ordinary life and figure out, Hey, how do you fit in my world when we are here seven days a week in the same town? Right. We had zero of that normal experience when we got married.
00:10:02
Speaker
So then in the first several years, especially we're like trying to adjust, adjust to
Housekeeping Conflicts in Marriage
00:10:07
Speaker
how much priority do I give you? Yeah. Yeah. when you are in my world all the time, not you show up on the weekend and everything you know revolves around you.
00:10:16
Speaker
Right. One way. Right. Yep. And so our expectations of how we spent time, of how we organized leisure time, of how we organized anything, do anything, be productive.
00:10:28
Speaker
We had no no, nothing to work with, no experience. And then we had turned out these very different expectations. Yep. And so that's where the sort of will be right, get it right, do it right, sort of start to show up, would guess.
00:10:43
Speaker
Well, I, as you said that, I was thinking our first year of marriage. So I had been raised by a very clean mother.
00:10:54
Speaker
And by that, I mean, she valued housekeeping and a clean house. And And I had, as the only female child, the only daughter, I'd always been her sidekick in that. Partly because i didn't like to see the stress it caused her when things were a big mess. Yes.
00:11:15
Speaker
So my routine on Saturdays had been help my mom clean the house. And then a lot of times during the week, do the laundry, the dishwasher, you know, that kind of thing.
00:11:27
Speaker
So when we first got married, i I was always an early riser, but I would get up early. And to me, the house needed to be tended to and cleaned before we did anything fun.
00:11:41
Speaker
Yes. And that was very different way of being. Very different in my house. It was rare if anybody stirred at my house before 11 or 12 on a Saturday. We were all sleeping in late. We'd probably...
00:11:55
Speaker
individually or sometimes collectively stayed up too late watching TV most of the time or doing something, you know, ah maybe being out. But Saturdays were, you know, laziness. I mean, not laziness, but just no activity. Well, see, my self-righteousness did label it as lazy. Okay, that's fair.
00:12:13
Speaker
um And so and I did not. I was like, still in bed. It's 930. It's 10. It's 1030. It's 11. And by the way, when you get up, we're doing nothing before the house is cleaned.
00:12:26
Speaker
So I had a way that seemed a scripture would say right to a man or in this case, a woman. Yes. And so I felt as if it needed to be done this way because we needed to be good stewards of what we had and we needed to be mature and take care of things and live an orderly life. And there's nothing that was wrong with that. right But I very much attached, ah I'm right and
Techniques for Marital Resolution
00:12:55
Speaker
you're wrong slash lazy.
00:12:56
Speaker
And my thought process was was, I have kind of two thoughts, I think, that I went with with that. One was, I was like, well, get it done. Like, you clean up when when company's coming over.
00:13:07
Speaker
Or when if you, occasionally my mom would splurge or or my grandmother would give her some money and we'd have a maid coming. And then we would have, some people have ah a laugh with about this, we cleaned up for the maid.
00:13:18
Speaker
Yes. Because we had to clean Because can't do what you We had to get up to a baseline level so that they could do anything productive if they're just picking up my clothes and putting them the hamper or whatever. So there was a, my attitude was, oh, we'll get it done and let's have our fun first because that might not happen and that would be the more important thing. That was sort of a little bit how operated.
00:13:37
Speaker
And then the other part was, I think a part of me started to, okay, she takes this really seriously. i guess it doesn't matter that much to me. Again, i decide, okay, I don't care that much or it's not worth a fight. I will.
00:13:51
Speaker
I'll mold. And I'm like, well, the whole world usually, you know, most of the world gets up earlier and does things like this. So I tried to play the game and come your way. And OK, you can choose what we do. And and what I didn't do, though, is you know, bring enough, here's what I think, here's what I feel.
00:14:10
Speaker
Can we do this differently? Like I didn't have a way to, I just kind of, I'm not sure if I went into fawn mode, but I definitely was going to be accommodating with most of that until I'd reached some sort of boiling point. And then all sudden I'm, I'm bursting out with some upsetness that hadn't really communicated and don't even know where it came from.
00:14:27
Speaker
Right. And then i would feel abandoned, left alone, because suddenly now you're angry. And this is the way we've always done it. And I am terrified of being angry because that's I saw destructive anger in my home. was the main thing I saw.
00:14:46
Speaker
That was my worst nightmare. So that sort of drove me even further to find the right answer. How do I not be this angry person? How do i how do i learn communication techniques? How do we read enough books on marriage? I did go on a quest to kind of fix it,
Lessons from 'The Good Place'
00:15:01
Speaker
I would say a lot. And we've talked about that, I think in other episodes of that desire to fix us and fix the relationship dynamic became a big driver for me.
00:15:10
Speaker
Well, and that sort of implies there was a right way to solve the problem or fix things and you would find it. Yes. Part of the reason we're thinking about this on this level too, is we've recently, um and we're, we know we're five years behind perhaps, but we recently binged The Good Place. Yes.
00:15:29
Speaker
which is a show that I've watched once before our kids had actually recommended and we'd heard good things about it. And I think I got into it ah two or three years ago when the one of the creators of the show came and spoke at Wake Forest and one of their programs they had there and I was intrigued by that and was went up and and heard, you know, this guy speak and he's behind.
00:15:48
Speaker
ah It's got him Mike Michael Scherer who's behind Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, a lot of different shows that people love. But anyway, I watched it once through I've been trying to persuade you to watch it. You were kind of resistant. I thought it was dumb. I had seen one episode and something about it just, I was committed that it was beneath me. I don't know. It's like a lot of shows. It takes a while to find its real footing, its real connection. Maybe three episodes in and, you know, it's, we're not going to say it's a Christian show.
00:16:20
Speaker
It's a thought provoking show. Yes. About what it means to be good, what it means to evolve from self-centered to other-centered, what do we think about the afterlife and why.
00:16:32
Speaker
It's not a prescriptive what to believe, but it's it's very thought-provoking and it's very entertaining. Yeah, it raises the question really well of are humans judged? How are we judged?
00:16:47
Speaker
If so, what does that mean? what does it mean for how we live? There's a lot of, you will not find another show that has as much express explicit discussion of like Immanuel Kant and Hobbes and Hume and and like philosophers. That's a whole kind of running thread and that makes it sound more boring than it is, but it I promise it's done in a clever way.
00:17:06
Speaker
But what we we were thinking about was ah there are a couple of truths that they really get right, that they really represent well. And one is this idea that man has goodness, that we as humans do have the ability to change. And in in Christianity, we call it the ah imago Dei. The image of God is on us. we're Yes, we are fallen. That's true. But before that's true, we're creating God's image.
Trauma and Neurological Development
00:17:28
Speaker
We reflect God and we have agency.
00:17:31
Speaker
Um, we have the fall, which they don't really, they, uh, depict the, a fallen world without saying it happened because of Adam and Eve or anything like that. They're like, isn't humanity really messed up?
00:17:42
Speaker
Isn't it difficult for people to behave well? And don't people tend towards lowest common denominator type behavior, but behind all this, there's this underlying, but we have the ability to change.
00:17:54
Speaker
And then they also, I'd say the second thing that they get really well is. One thing that affects our ability to change for the better is trauma, family of origin, things that have happened to us and things that have, that we've experienced and they don't go into neuroscience at all, but we know now from neuroscience that those things wire our brains. Talk little about that, Wendy, kind of the connection of those formative experience that you and I have just kind of alluded to a little bit and what's going on in the brain as that kind of thing happens.
00:18:23
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So first of all, I would say that God literally hardwired us, um designed our brains in a way that we need and we crave connection.
00:18:38
Speaker
So we were not meant to be alone. And spiritually, we'd say, you know, we're made in the image of the Trinity. you know, we're made for relationship and we're made for a relationship with humans.
00:18:49
Speaker
and we said and eve yeah at and And when he was, when Adam was created, God saw that. man was alone and that was not good. Right. I'll make a suitable companion. Right. um And Kurt Thompson is the one who's, I know, and Christian and ah and a physician who is writing a lot about this, but is he the one who says, we come into this world looking for somebody looking for us? Yeah, we never stop.
00:19:11
Speaker
He does. And I would say Dan Siegel does more of what you're talking about, this interpersonal neurobiology and how the brain develops in the context of relationship.
00:19:22
Speaker
And so we're born with a certain number of connections between ourselves as a baby. And those grow, those increase in number as we become adults.
00:19:34
Speaker
But there are several pivotal periods of development where the connections that are not being used get pruned away. And so as we are young, so in the first three years of life, but really starting at about seven months, the way that a child is tended to, reliably or not, changes the connections get that get formed between the cells.
00:20:02
Speaker
And so, for instance, the bonding chemicals, like like dopamine and oxytocin, we develop receptors for those, the more of a secure relationship that we're in and the more that we feel loved and we feel safe and soothed when we are dysregulated.
00:20:22
Speaker
and so It's fascinating to me how neuroscience is is, you can say, confirming scripture or catching up with it or they're catching up with each other. But so much of what we hear in scripture of the one another, so bear one another's burdens, care for one another, it turns out there is neurobiology underpinning that.
00:20:41
Speaker
Right. They go together. It's not a tension when you're in up science and and our faith are not saying ah contrary things They're actually saying very complementary things. Right. um right And that sort of helps answer the question though of what makes some of these patterns so deeply entrenched, like my desire to have the answer to be right.
00:21:02
Speaker
um Well, one of the things I was going to add is when we know, we know that when children and their brains have been through hard situations, any sort of traumatic, hard,
00:21:17
Speaker
Formative experiences that have happened more than like a one off time. yeah We know that their brains overall are smaller than other children.
00:21:28
Speaker
We know that their emotional center, particularly the amygdala, is larger. not just proportionately to the size of the brain, but it is larger than a child's brain in a child's brain that has not been through such a difficult circumstance.
00:21:44
Speaker
So that larger amygdala becomes the fruit of it is a brain that is more hypervigilant to fear and to risk. And so we have found a way to try to get connection and we have become aware of what works and what doesn't.
00:22:04
Speaker
And so the design in it, I would say on on a spiritual level would be, That if the amygdala were not larger, then this child would continue to fall for situations. And even when they have a choice to do otherwise, to entrust themselves to people who are not trustworthy.
00:22:25
Speaker
So now what ah what does that mean on the flip side? That often there are people that are trustworthy that they refuse to entrust themselves to. And we become adults unhealed.
00:22:36
Speaker
Who do the same thing, but the design would be, they have learned their lessons, so to speak, that people cannot be trusted. And so this amygdala is always right on edge.
00:22:51
Speaker
And she it's, yeah. and So that's basically where they've adapted. Their maybe slightly older elementary or teenage self adapted. That's what we talk about sort of adapting cope coping strategies or styles of relating yup ways of looking at the universe.
00:23:06
Speaker
And they've adapted it and and it's good in a way that they've adapted to you know, to be able to sense threats. um And it's staying wired in that world.
00:23:17
Speaker
threat perception, you know, so hair trigger, so ready that that becomes problematic as they encounter a broader range of people in the world. Right, so for instance, going back to the Saturday morning cleaning that I brought into our marriage, when you would reject something that I thought was very important, I felt alone and abandoned, okay? So it wasn't that I had the ability at that time to modulate and to think, oh, he just has a different way.
00:23:52
Speaker
To me, there was so much bound up in doing things the right way that I had been taught. And one of those, as silly as it sounds, was how to take care of the house.
00:24:03
Speaker
Yeah. And I think I brought that sort of imposed, there's a right way in terms of conflict because that we had two different houses in that regard
Conflict and Childhood Wounds
00:24:14
Speaker
as well. You all would have kind of didn't have conflict, certainly didn't have healthy conflict. You would have some blowing up and anger, but conflict.
00:24:23
Speaker
No working through it. ah No repair. You had rupture, no repair. We had rupture and some repair, and but some of it was maybe not the healthiest in terms of repair, but at least it it was some attempt to say, hey, I lost my head. I'm sorry.
00:24:37
Speaker
So I had certain expectations about how, if we did have conflict, how it would go or should go. And that's where I could get heavy handed and like, you're not doing it right. And shame you and, and blow up and, and use more words to try to persuade you, Hey, there's a right way and you're not doing it.
00:24:54
Speaker
Right. And so when I wouldn't do it, how did that leave you feeling? Right. I would get more and more desperate. I would be spinning in my head without, you know, you wouldn't necessarily see it to know me. Kind of like, you know, seeing a duck who's, you know, floating on the surface, but their feet are paddling underneath. yeah In my head, I'm going, what do I do next? What do I say? How do I fix this? I can't stand somebody's disapproval.
00:25:17
Speaker
Yeah, would you say it was, it felt rejecting? You used the word disapproval. It felt reject rejecting and then at its worst, at your most extreme ways that you communicated, it felt abandoning.
00:25:28
Speaker
So I'm over here feeling abandoned. I didn't realize until probably... 10, 12, 13 years in our marriage, I had a pretty significant abandonment wound. And I had no idea um how to connect that, that when you said, i you know, didn't want to be in relationship with you right now, yeah or I want to run away. Yeah, I would be like, Oh, no go into desperate mode, because I had experienced that.
00:25:51
Speaker
And I didn't even know that level of desperation was operating below the surface. And I didn't know that I had had an abandonment wound, but more than that, a wound of insecure attachment.
00:26:06
Speaker
And so me, the threatening to leave was the only way that I felt like I could find freedom and breathe. And so the ways that we dealt with our wounds were in great contrast.
00:26:19
Speaker
And i would I would be sort of what would outrage me or get me into a level of anger and outrage is when you were saying things like that, and that is the only way you knew to express some of that or the only way it could come out.
00:26:32
Speaker
And to me, it felt you know like a and a personal attack, rejection, abandonment. You're bad, you're wrong, whatever. And there is a right way. And that's where I think for me, some of the, we need to do this right.
00:26:46
Speaker
it wasn't just, I need to do it right. I put a lot on you. of You need to do it right. And you're not doing it right. And that you were feeling that. Okay. I like what you just said. It intrigued me. um You took it very personally.
00:26:57
Speaker
I think this is what we do often with conflict, not just you and me, yeah but I see this a lot. We take another person's behavior, perspective, commitment of how they're going to proceed with their life as a personal affront.
00:27:16
Speaker
Yeah, you're saying something about me. and And everything I hold dear. And that was a long time before we could even, only with some help, get a category for, hey, the other person's expressing this and feeling this a certain way. And some of that actually isn't about you.
00:27:32
Speaker
and so it's It's not directed as you. and And they don't even know that you're experiencing it that way. Well, and I go back to our friend from dinner who said he and his old friend are learning to dialogue, not debate.
00:27:47
Speaker
Yes. And so I'm thinking about that. Like, why is it such a personal affront?
Certainty, Validation, and Security
00:27:54
Speaker
If you want to view something differently, you believe something differently, you behave differently, feel different things. Yeah.
00:28:05
Speaker
why Why do you think that is such an insult? Yeah, we've been thinking about this a lot lately. um The idea of, and I think about a lot as a conflict resolution expert, as a mediator, a collaborative lawyer, i am constantly, and and when people come to me, they want me to be their champion, their soldier.
00:28:29
Speaker
Go prove that I'm right. Go show what a lousy person the other person is or how terrible they were, why my way is right. And because of my training as a mediator and conflict resolver, I am resistant to that.
00:28:41
Speaker
I want to say, Oh my gosh, my friend, you are on this pinwheel or this ah merry-go-round that's never going to win. You all are never going to convince the other person um that you're right. And you may or may not convince a judge that you're right.
00:28:55
Speaker
Or by the time both of you keep arguing so much to say the other person is terrible and not being truthful, guess what? The judge ain't going to like either of you. and And so this quest for i will be vindicated, I will be found to be right. it I now recognize it in my older form, older self as futile.
00:29:13
Speaker
um But in the throes of it, I think it was a threat to my ability to know that I understand the world and me understanding the world was really important.
00:29:25
Speaker
Like I've got a way to figure out the world and this is part of it. So it's that certainty, right? Like I saw somebody the other day and they had written, I'm in recovery from the addiction to being certain about everything.
00:29:41
Speaker
And so none of us like to lose. We like to be right. We like to quote win, but Why? I was singing too, ah Bono has a great lyric in one song ah from, I think it's from, I forget which album it's from, but it's, I'm trying to get over certainty, basically. but um and And then he says, stop helping God across the road like a little old lady.
00:30:05
Speaker
Oh, Like, have to show up for God and make sure that he is vindicated by proving the rectitude of my position
Personal Growth through TV Analogies
00:30:11
Speaker
of everything. That's a pretty powerful line. It is. it is. It's very, it's very interesting. And there's the old story of, uh, that we've heard many times of St. Teresa or of, uh, Mother Teresa and the famous journalist goes over and talking to her and, and is talking about, you know, his doubt. And i was like, pray that I'll have certainty. She says, no, I'm not going to do that.
00:30:30
Speaker
I will pray that you will. have faith or something yes i think it's that you'll have faith that you'll feel loved yeah but you're not going to get certainty and i'm not going give you that but there's something about and i remember hearing a podcast by adam young that just nailed me on this where he said basically if you've had trauma if you've had this you know an unstable home environment and it doesn't take much it doesn't take yeah i had good care compared especially to other people that i know i had good care also but i had this mix of good care and also
00:31:00
Speaker
really bad care where I was parentified early and I had to be the man in the house to be in charge. There's this whole mix of things where that has happened and memory because of that is, is fragmented.
00:31:12
Speaker
There's a craving for certainty. There's a craving for some unifying theory or answer or doctrine or something that will make this all good and right. And anything that smacks of that or offers that feels like water to the part soul.
00:31:27
Speaker
Well, and this to me takes me straight into spirituality, to my Christian faith. Like, what do I do with God, either when what I'm so sure I'm right about believing or doing doesn't produce the results I long for? Yes. Or what do I do with people who seem to interpret Him differently?
00:31:54
Speaker
And before we go down the spiritual road too much, I want to come back to The Good Place because I think The Good Place illustrates this so beautifully with a couple of the characters, couple of the main characters. The one that I'm sort of ah have identified strongly with is Chidi Adagonia, who is a professor of, of he's a moral philosopher, a professor of ethics, and he is here in the good place.
00:32:13
Speaker
And it's just a great, um they look at what made him and how he got to where he is. And there's a formative story there's, you know, they show that he was always indecisive and couldn't make of his mind about things. And but then they trace that back to where He decided that there is a right answer to everything and he's going to study it and find it.
00:32:35
Speaker
It makes him into this person who later writes his, you know, his, his doctoral thesis is like 3000 pages. yes Nobody wants to read it because it's just overwhelming and incomprehensible, all this stuff. But it traces back later, late in the series, little bit of a spoiler, but to a moment where his parents were fighting. He's little el eight year old guy, third grade, I think.
00:32:56
Speaker
His parents were fighting and he knows they're both professors or his dad's a professor. And he basically dresses up like a little professor and comes up with this whole presentation and this great argument of why they should stay together.
00:33:08
Speaker
And they did actually stay together. They decided to work on their marriage relationship. And he thought at that point in time, there's an answer to everything.
00:33:19
Speaker
Right. It's because he said the right thing. He had a little presentation. Uh-huh. And, and they said, wow, you've given us something to think about. Now what he doesn't know much later is, well, that was enough to convince them to go to counseling, but they had to do a lot of work on their relationship to actually be able to stay together. But he took that on and I could relate to that. Like, oh my words have power. There were things I said in the middle of my parents' conflict that seemed to stop the conflict in their tracks.
00:33:45
Speaker
And you know, that, having power in my words was of appeal to me and that idea of there is a right answer for me it it showed up more in the form of the christian faith and christianity and following christ oh that's what's going to ensure that i don't have tumult in my family and make everything right i've bought everything that was taught to me about the christian faith of well if you live like jesus then you have conflict because you'll all be peaceful and blessed are the peacemakers. you're going to be peacemakers. Right. Right. But that didn't, when that didn't manifest itself, when that didn't deliver, when I turned out, I was a sinner married to another person who was a sinner and we had these unhealthy ways of relating and and having conflict.
00:34:27
Speaker
And then you birth multiple sinners who then live in your home. Right. Right. um And you run into unsolvable problems or difficult conundrums. And so they depict that beautifully in the good place. So Chidi comes to his end of just, what do I do with the fact that I think there's got to be a perfect answer, but literally I'm frozen. I can't choose a hat or I can't choose what ice cream flavor to have.
00:34:49
Speaker
Now, Eleanor, meanwhile, the other main character, Eleanor Shellstrop, had a very different upbringing. Also, tumult and chaos in her family. Her parents split up or they may never been together.
00:35:00
Speaker
And she kind of emancipated herself from them. And they show the depiction of kind of her trauma being left to fend for herself. It's all done in a lighthearted way. It's not too heavy a show to watch. But you get the impression her parents were abusive and harmful.
00:35:14
Speaker
And she formed a different style of relating out of that, which is basically, I'm never going to be serious. I'm never going to trust anybody. I am not going let anybody get close. I'm going run before anybody has chance to hurt me.
00:35:25
Speaker
Yes. And so it's fun to watch those two characters as they are interacting with each other um and what that what that brings alive in both of them. But what I love is the picture that the goodness is in there.
00:35:39
Speaker
The good desire is in there. The image of God is in there, if you will. And these life circumstances that contribute to brain wiring make it so that their patterns of behaving, their style of relating the world is very well entrenched.
00:35:55
Speaker
And and and they did they demonstrate this very comically because one of the premises that ends up running in the show is if you have, if humans have enough reboots, enough sort of resets and start over and they give them a chance and then you control the environment, ah humans can get better.
00:36:12
Speaker
But it takes like a bajillion reboots. um And, you know, people keep sort of making the same mistakes, but if you, you know as we've often wished, if we could have do-overs or if we could have had practice children before we had real children, you know, yeah it takes almost like an infinite number um of those because the wiring is so deep.
00:36:30
Speaker
Right.
Embracing Imperfection and Growth
00:36:31
Speaker
um You know, you make me think of, um so Ocean Vong is one of my favorite authors in this season, Asian American creative writer, professor at And my u And he was just discussing his most recent book, The Emperor of Gladness. okay And somebody in the audience was saying they related to a particular character and wanted Ocean's take on him. And he said, well, he is loosely based on me, but that character is a far better version of me. But that's because he got 12 drafts.
00:37:08
Speaker
got twelve drafts Yeah. And I'm like, isn't that just true? Like the rebooting and the starting over and the trying again. And I think that's what falling down when our strategies don't work, our being right and committed to a way doesn't work. We fall down, we fall apart. We get back up in hope.
00:37:29
Speaker
That's a bit of a reboot. Like, what am I going to do now with myself? Who am I going to find God to be in this? Yes. And that sort of leads to, as we were thinking through, what is it that makes the difference? How do we shift from this?
00:37:45
Speaker
I've got a way that life is going to work and I'm going to impose it on everybody around me, either forcefully or subtly or manipulatively. There's all different kinds of ways that can show up. But I am, if I am speaking to be heard, to persuade, to win, I'm trying to pull you over really to seeing the world as I see it, but it's as a demand.
00:38:06
Speaker
yeah It's basically come and operate this way because I think this way is the best. And we will have people, I know you have it in your context and I have it in in in my context as well, people who actually take their way of viewing the world or the relationship and they'll slap God's stamp on it.
00:38:23
Speaker
Yeah, as well. Yeah. I think we'll resort to anything when we're desperate to get someone to validate us and to not leave us or reject us.
00:38:35
Speaker
And so if I can tell you this is what God wants you to do then that that can be a massive trump card. Now, it may be right, but it's certainly not fueled most of the time out of love.
00:38:49
Speaker
right right and in fact we we're also i think we were naming too we're operating um if we have to honor the other person's perspective that there's a sense in which they might be right one of the things that runs into is is a terror that we have it's like what if they are right what if what they're saying is true and it's a criticism of me that's actually correct can i how do i stand how do i handle that if i don't have enough of a self that can go, you know what? I am a, I'm a decent person, but I'm a flawed person and I am capable of messing up.
Love versus Coercion in Influence
00:39:25
Speaker
Oh my gosh. It's taken years for us to get the point of being less surprised. Oh wait, I messed that up. I dropped a ball. I failed to attune to your need. Wait a minute. How should I, why am I surprised by that?
00:39:38
Speaker
Of course I did because I was wired differently. doesn't mean I'm terrible and all is lost. I think we're more solid in the reality of who we each are and that this one event or behavior does not dictate everything else about us.
00:39:55
Speaker
Yes. Now, I want to go back to what I said just a minute ago, and I think this would be a fun future episode. But when we, I think there's some complication to a comment that i just said. Okay.
00:40:08
Speaker
When we have a scriptural basis for how we are talking to someone or encouraging them to live or think, we had what I was trying to say is love and coercion opposites. Oh, yes. okay So it's not that we may be wrong in our desire for this person.
00:40:32
Speaker
But God allows us, as Larry k Crabb used to put it, to try out every other potential God until we have gone through them all, found them unsatisfying and settled for him.
00:40:47
Speaker
And so I think that is the nature of imitating his love. Okay. So, and there's a lot of nuance there, but if someone is behaving in a way that I think is contrary to God, am I willing to let God communicate that to them versus I coerce them? Because if I feel the need to coerce, I've got to be really careful that it's truly about them and not about me being proven as right, even with myself.
Resolving Conflicts through Common Interests
00:41:17
Speaker
That's reminding me of um a a moment that happened in a workshop I did recently on a ah program that my business partner and I have done for probably 15 years now. and we're in the process of actually maybe turning to a book called Don't Let the Jokers Drive You Batty. And it's about how not to let crazy makers, people get under your skin and get you off your game. How they can make you want to cross lines and do things you wouldn't otherwise do because they know exactly where to poke people.
00:41:42
Speaker
and what buttons to push and how to get you out of your out of your right wise mind and this one guy was saying we were asking people what are your thoughts what are your suggestions for how to deal with these jokers these difficult people we run into and this one guy's like know your case so well and know the facts so well that you have the answer for every argument they give and i said well Yeah, I am not against knowing the facts and knowing everything well, but i would I would suggest that if you are still thinking you know it so well that you're going to disprove them, that you're going to prove them wrong, you're still playing their game.
00:42:15
Speaker
You're still in that realm of, oh yeah, you got this? Well, I got this. And you're still, you're actually feeding the frenzy. You're actually feeding the, they love the drama. They love the conflict. And there's something else you and talked about. There are people who,
00:42:30
Speaker
And sometimes in our dysregulated state, we would settle for a fight instead of true intimacy. Like, at least if you're fighting with me, I've got your attention and you're not somewhere else. And sometimes that feels good enough.
00:42:42
Speaker
And for a person who's really dysregulated these kind of joker type behaviors that we talked about, they love the fight. They love seeing you scramble. And so what I encourage this person to think about is, know know your case so well, know the facts so well, you don't have to argue.
00:42:56
Speaker
that you actually can rest in, kind of know what's true and you can think other things and I'm going to hold loosely that, well well, there's a humility aspect to it and there's confidence aspect to it. The confidence is i know what I know.
00:43:11
Speaker
i know how I'm going to operate, how I want to conduct myself. I know it's true. Do I know absolute truth? Do I know what ultimately is right or what should happen in a circumstance? Actually, I hold that a little bit more loosely.
00:43:22
Speaker
actually don't know. Maybe maybe you're supposed to be right. you know More than I am. um But that idea of confidence and peacefulness that if I'm secure, i think it's that way you phrased it. If I'm secure in myself, I don't have to make you come my way. Is that sort of capturing a little bit? Absolutely.
00:43:43
Speaker
And I can afford then to love because it is focused on you and not on me. And I think that is the nature of genuine love. Um, a thing I wanted to add in the mix that, that, that we kind of bring from, from the conflict resolution world is I'm really always trying to help people get out of this mindset of positions.
00:44:04
Speaker
Like I will not do this and I will do this. My position is this, my position that, well, my position's over here. And you know, that, that is, it's just, that's the language of warfare. That's the language of entrenched and I have to win.
00:44:17
Speaker
yeah um What I am constantly trying to reframe any kind of conflict situation into is a discussion about interests. yeah What is important to me? What matters? What do I value? What does each person in this situation value or desire or want?
00:44:33
Speaker
Because that that changes the entire relationship. ah conversation, what do I care about? What am I interested in? Because when you broaden it like that, a lot of times people will find they have overlapping interests. Their positions are not going to overlap. They're going to be, I'm over here, you're over there, and I'm not moving.
00:44:51
Speaker
but When you start framing a situation as one of interests, you can actually find some common ground to build on. Well, everybody wants this like over soon, right? And nobody wants this to cost a bunch more money like it already has, right?
00:45:05
Speaker
Do we agree on that? And when we see we have interests that are common, we can move together. Now, in a marriage come context, the same thing can happen. Like we don't want to be this miserable.
00:45:16
Speaker
We don't want to end up unhappy, things like that. And so that is a principle I think that can help as well. Right. Because I think at that point, we have to realize that it's not just the absence of conflict we're after. Why do we keep having the same fight?
00:45:34
Speaker
But it's can we find our way back to each other for a safe and fulfilling connection? and often if you And that doesn't come through coercion. Yeah. And if you frame it for that in in working with a couple, as we do sometimes, we say, is either of you not want to be closer?
00:45:53
Speaker
Isn't intimacy something that you want? Maybe there's a lot of hurt and there somebody's like, I'm not sure. And therefore a lot of fear. Yes. And so there may be fear around it, but at the core, there is a desire that you can kind of build on and say, we both want to feel closer, not farther apart after we discuss something like that.
00:46:11
Speaker
Right. Because we want to feel safe. Yeah. And I think as a means that, I think it's peace. Yeah. You know, ah the posture of curiosity and openness to another person's perspective and awareness. Oh, it's going different, but I might learn something.
00:46:27
Speaker
That's a more peaceful posture than that internally, you know, driven like, uh-uh, no, no, somebody's wrong. um Right. It's an internal sense of peace. It may not feel...
00:46:39
Speaker
interpersonally peaceful at that time. But there is a posture of, i can be okay if this doesn't go the way that I think it needs to go.
00:46:51
Speaker
That's a huge shift, a huge shift right there. and I think it leads ultimately two peace between the couple, not a piece fake, not a you know absence of engagement because that's death. that's what we're talking about.
00:47:04
Speaker
But if both people can get to a place of curiosity, openness, welcoming, you're going to have a different perspective and it might actually help. um That is where they can find each other again to use your language.
00:47:17
Speaker
Yep. Yep. All right. So thanks for listening and happy weekend. See you soon.