[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:05] Speaker B: Welcome to the Perimeter Counseling Podcast, a ministry of Perimeter Church. I'm your host, Caleb Martin. Perimeter Counseling center is a Christ centered, clinically informed group of counselors who are passionate about offering redemptive, holistic and practical principles to guide you through life's challenges. Thanks for joining us today. Welcome back to another episode of the Perimeter Counseling Podcast. I'm Caleb Martin, director of our counseling center here with my co host Kathy Chang. And we are talking about marriage. This time the big topic of marriage. And we're going to talk about everything there is to know about marriage in 20 minutes. So buckle up. Of course not. But we're going to introduce some topics here and of course we can't get to everything in detail on all these. Um, so we may be doing a marriage series later, but we want to just introduce some of the topic of marriage and even some of the questions or things we would have liked to know entering marriage. So we have an ex marriage expert on our counseling staff here in Bennetter is back. [00:01:10] Speaker A: That's what you would call me? Yeah, I wouldn't call myself that. [00:01:14] Speaker B: Yep, you do probably more volume of marriage counseling than anybody on our staff. So that's why we're asking you to be here. You've done extensive training through various programs, one being the Gottman, which is really well known, I think around the world as far as marriage observation experts on what makes marriage work. And so really thought you'd be a great guest for today. [00:01:37] Speaker A: Well, thank you. [00:01:39] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, how long have you been married? [00:01:42] Speaker A: So I've been married to Jason for next November will be 28 years. Yes. Yeah, that's all same. It has been. We're entering back into our limerence phase of. You know what a limerence phase is? No, that's that honeymoon phase where you're in for maybe they. Apparently it's like two years that a couple's in a limerence phase when they first meet where they're just in love. And so my daughter's still in that phase and she's almost been married now for six months. And she asked us last night, what phase are you and dad in? I said, we're getting back into the limerence phase. [00:02:11] Speaker B: That's awesome. That's fun. You appreciated that? Yeah, absolutely. [00:02:15] Speaker A: So there's hope for all of us. [00:02:17] Speaker B: Yeah, we can go back around. That's awesome. Well, the first thing that we talked about I think in preparing for this is just the statement that marriage is hard. So let's just hop into that. Maybe what are some, some of your initial thoughts on just that statement. Just talk about that. [00:02:36] Speaker A: Well, I think we are disillusioned when we get married. When we think about, like, Disney movies and the idea of relive happily ever after, that's just not reality. And I am convinced that that that is why God has us enter into covenant with one another. Because sometimes when I'm in counseling and I have a couple come in, they might have, I do a very thorough assessment with them. That might be their only strength. And that's not surprising because I'm working with mostly believers in this space here. But, you know, I'm so grateful because they have a lot of red, red, red, red. Needs improvement. Needs improvement. But under commitment, when I see that strength there, I say, thank you, God, because it's your covenant that's keeping this couple together. It's your covenant that is making them sit here today and to fight to make their marriage work. Because marriage really is hard. And when you think about it, anything in our life that's worth having, it takes a lot of work. And we all know that with other areas of our life, like, let's say, for example, we want to be a healthy person. That's not easy to be healthy. We have to go to bed on time. We have to eat healthy foods, we have to not eat things that we want to eat. We have to exercise. And so we. When we take our health seriously, it's going to require a lot of work. And so I would want couples to know that marriage is the same way. It's worth having. It's good to be married, but it requires work and it's hard. [00:04:00] Speaker B: What is it about marriage that makes it feel like it should be easy? It almost feels like in our culture, I don't know what it is that it's not in those categories. Like, if I have to work for this, then it's not that I'm not meant for this, or it's wrong or I married the wrong person or if it feels hard. Why is that, you think? [00:04:21] Speaker A: I don't know what you think. [00:04:22] Speaker C: He. [00:04:23] Speaker A: What I think is that we don't talk enough about it being hard. All we have is our parents, and we see a lot of movies, and maybe in some movies now, we're seeing more like realistic marriages. But there is, I think, this idea of comparing ourselves to other people. So I hear that a lot, and I'm sure you guys have heard this too, where people come to church even, and they say, I look around and everybody has these happy families and we're not happy. But all those People are pretending they're not as happy as they look because we're not honest. And I'm not even saying we need to be totally transparent with a lot of people, but there needs to be more discussions around this, around the reality of what it looks like to die, to self, to have humility, to repent. Often those are hard things to do. [00:05:10] Speaker C: Yeah, I totally agree with you. And I'm really glad that we're starting just with the statement that marriage is hard because like you said, I feel like whatever the source might be, I think a lot of it may have to do with media. I look even at the books. I have two teenage daughters and like the books that are available to them, a lot of it is just this idea of a fairy tale. And that's the picture that we kind of grow up with the kind of the dreams that we have. And it's not realistic in a world where it's, you know, it's two sinners coming together. It's just not going to be a fairy tale. And so, you know, for people who are listening, I just want for all of us to acknowledge that it is okay and it is normal if marriage feels hard. So I love that this is our starting point. [00:05:59] Speaker B: Absolutely. It's often there's a statement from Tim Keller, this vision he gives in his book Meaning of Marriage, where he talks about chiseling out one another. So you kind of come with like think about a sculpture and you're each kind of an unfinished sculpture. And so part of the spouse's job is to chisel out this person kind of along the way through sanctification to become who God wants them to be. He goes further that he says, when you see your spouse in heaven, you'll see them and you'll say, oh man, I knew you could always be. I knew this is who you were. And that's the vision of marriage. But I think culturally it is very self centered on what I can get from my spouse. My job is to only get what you can give me and make me feel good about myself. And so certainly as a byproduct of marriage, like it should be enjoyable. But I think I love that vision, that kind of. Keller points from Ephesians 5, just that that's our job. It's a sanctifying work. [00:07:03] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a lot of what I do with couples that I work with is getting them to refrain that. So when their spouse comes to them and says, hey honey, this really hurts me when you talk to me this way, or when you didn't do this thing that I asked you to do. You have an option there. You can get defensive and want to look right and be right and get defensive. Or you can say, maybe there's an area here in my life where I probably need to be a little bit more disciplined or be more thoughtful. And so when you can reframe it that way, and you look at your wife like you were just. Or your husband like you were just saying, caleb is. This is God's way of growing me in this area of my life. I can drill down and get really defensive and try to defend. Defend my stance. Or I can say, maybe God's trying to grow me here. And we. We can do that as a. I think we have the capacity to do that because we have the Holy Spirit in us who wants us to be sanctified. [00:07:57] Speaker B: Absolutely. Talk a little bit about growing intimacy in marriage, kind of. What is it? What? There's some advice you give to couples when you think about that topic. How can people grow together, kind of be on the same team, grow in their relationship? [00:08:11] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:08:12] Speaker A: So, you know, going back to research, what research shows, and I think this is really significant for people when they have their first child, because a lot of times, I know in my own marriage personally, Jason and I were married for five years before our first child came, and we had some conflicts. But there is something different when that first child comes that really cuts into our time. And so. [00:08:36] Speaker C: One of the things that. [00:08:37] Speaker A: The Gottmans recommend is they recommend they have, like, six hours a week that they recommend cut up into different pieces. But one of the things they recommend is a daily weeknight. And that was something Jason. I noticed in my marriage. He was so intentional about that. And he would every week say. And he would ask me, like, can we go on a date on Friday night? And in my mind, I'd be like, I'm too tired. I just want to. You know. But I would. I would usually go unless I had a really strong reason not to. But he was so intentional about that. And I really think that his intentionality. He wooed me in that way. And what that did is that it carved out this time for us to talk. Without that, it's really hard. And what we can see when we look at the Gottmans, like you said earlier, they did research on couples. When that first child is born in that first year, you will be shocked. Then, you know how much time that those couples spent talking about, like, anything relevant in that. Like, in a week period, 15 minutes, you can't be intimate when you're only talking 15 minutes a week. [00:09:36] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:09:36] Speaker A: And so there has to be this sense that, yes, we have a baby, and that is awesome, but we have to make our relationship a priority and we have to carve out time. It's a time thing. It's simple, but it is. [00:09:53] Speaker B: It takes intentionality and pursuit. I love what you said about Jason. That's a great example of doing that, and I'd love to learn from that as well. It's an example for me. We've talked about assuming the best in your spouse. That's a challenge. [00:10:11] Speaker C: I know. [00:10:11] Speaker B: How does that usually play out? Like, talk to me about why that's important, what that usually looks like. [00:10:20] Speaker A: Yeah. So, you know, God tells us we are supposed to honor others above ourselves, but sometimes what can happen is when we are. When we're in these stressful situations in our life, when we're feeling fatigued and tired and irritable with our spouse, we oftentimes start to build what I call, like, a false narrative about our spouse. And we tell ourselves these stories, and I hear it all the time. I see to myself where we start to say things to ourselves like, well, my. My. My wife just doesn't love me. She just doesn't care about me. Or he's just lazy, or she lacks discipline. And we can run in our minds and we have to create a habit of mind that we are looking at our spouse and assuming the best in him when we assume the worst. I feel. I feel that. How do your. How does your spouse even overcome that? They can't. How do they speak into that? Because it's something that's going on in your own mind and you're living it out, but you're not talking about it. You're just seeing everything through this negative lens. [00:11:20] Speaker B: Yeah. I feel like that's the way maybe the evil one wants to twist and get in there and get. Give that lie. Almost like one of the things I see a lot is if I was. It leads to the question, if I was married to somebody else, like, this would be better. Like, you know, that's not that far from that narrative, going to that belief. And then it becomes about the other person. Right. Instead of about what I can do. I think we were talking about earlier, Kathy, what's the. Like when my agency moves from myself outside to the other person and the danger of that. Do you want to speak to that a little bit? [00:12:00] Speaker C: Yeah, I think, you know, just kind of tying it to this idea of assuming the best in your spouse. There is this tendency, I think when we have this negative narrative, false narrative, we're assuming a lot. We're assuming the worst a lot of times, and we make our responses dependent on that narrative that we've created. And honestly, we don't know what a spouse's motive might be. In a moment, it could be something negative or it could be something very different. But what we have agency over is not our spouse. It is our own response and how we react in that moment. And so I don't know, Karen, if you have thoughts on, you know, if you are able to recognize this in yourself, and recognizing it, I think is really hard that you are living out. [00:12:56] Speaker A: Of a false narrative. [00:12:57] Speaker C: But if you have been thinking through it, if you're able to recognize it, are there ways to proactively kind of counteract that false narrative? Are there things that we can do that help us to step out of that? I don't know if you have a specific. [00:13:13] Speaker A: So that's one of the things I think that is helpful in marriage counseling, because when I do counseling with people, I have them dialogue all the time with one another. So they're having a dialogue, and I only step in when I need to, to provide awareness where people don't see it, and they usually are shocked. So one of the things that awareness is, the first thing that's really important is recognizing. I'm making an assumption here. So what I try to get people to move towards is when you recognize you're making the assumption, you check in. That's the word I use. You say, hey, you seem like you're really angry right now. Is that right? Are you angry with me? And then the spouse might go, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. I didn't mean that. No, I was just really frustrated because I told Johnny five minutes ago to put this away, and I just noticed it. But we think they're just being mean to me because whatever our narrative is in that moment, so the importance of just checking in and seeking to understand that what you're thinking, is it really true? Even something as simple as, hey, you haven't spent a lot of time with me lately, or, you know, I really miss you, do you miss me too? Those kind of just checking in questions. When we do that, we build understanding, and our spouse also starts to see then what they're doing that and how that's coming across to us in ways that they don't really want it to. [00:14:33] Speaker C: Yeah, I love that. [00:14:35] Speaker B: Yeah. And I just think the idea. There's a lot of freedom in drawing kind of a fence around my own heart and say, this is the only area I actually have full control over. I don't have control over my spouse's heart. Their narrative, what they're thinking, my kids, it goes into any other relationship, actually, so. And Paul Tripp even says, the greatest danger in the world is not actually outside of us, it's inside of us. And if we recognize that, that would change things quite a bit. So for me to say, I have freedom, regardless of how my spouse treats me, to respond in grace and in kindness, and that's what God is calling me to do in every moment. He's not calling me to fix my spouse. He's calling me to love and influence my spouse with grace. There's a lot of freedom in that, I think, for husbands and wives to live like that. [00:15:31] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah. [00:15:33] Speaker C: I don't know if this has happened to you both, but when you have a new couple that comes in for counseling and will sit down and say, you know, what is it that you hope for from counseling? I've had more than one couple that will come in and they will look at their spouse and say, I would like for him to change, or I. [00:15:49] Speaker A: Would like her to. [00:15:52] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. [00:15:55] Speaker C: And I will tell them very early on that that cannot be our hope. Our ultimate hope cannot be in the other person changing. [00:16:04] Speaker A: Right. [00:16:04] Speaker C: Just like we've just been there, that's not within our control. That's something that God can certainly do, and we pray for that and we move towards it. [00:16:11] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:16:12] Speaker C: But if that's our ultimate hope, we're probably going to be disappointed at some point. So our hope has to be in the one who changes our hearts, who gets us control over our responses, our love and the grace that we can show and the one who can change their heart, Whether that happens on our timeline or the way that we want it to. [00:16:35] Speaker B: Yes. That's important, too. [00:16:37] Speaker A: I would also say sometimes God doesn't want our spouse to change. And I'll say that from this perspective that we are all uniquely gifted and designed by God. So, for example, I am an. I am way too serious. I am a deep thinker, and I can get really deep really fast. My husband can go deep for, like, five seconds, and then he wants to have fun. Hey, let's go to this. Let's watch golf tonight or let's do this. So that used to get on my nerves, and I always thought, God, I just want him to be more serious. Can we just have a serious conversation where. And I know he's probably thinking, can she Just a little bit and be more fun. So. So do you see, like, so the golden in that is not that. It's not that God changes my husband, but can I appreciate him? And when I got that difference in my mind and I started saying, God, I appreciate Jason's sense of humor, and I value that because that's a gift to me that he makes me laugh. And so when we can move past wanting our spouse to change and move towards appreciating the way that they're different from us, that's a whole different level. [00:17:41] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's such a good point. And that's one of the things where I often talk to counselees just about, you know, when you get sort of entrenched, if there's difficulty or conflict or just differences of personality that are not necessarily sinful, are we able to step back and say, how do I see my spouse reflecting the glory of God as an image bearer? Where do I see God in him or her? Because we tend to see them through our own lens of whatever it might be. And so, you know, kind of piggybacking just on what you said, asking the Lord, how can I see the good and learn to appreciate and love those things? [00:18:22] Speaker A: Yes. [00:18:22] Speaker C: That the way you've created. [00:18:25] Speaker B: Yeah. So just naming. There are sin things and there are suffering things, and there are personality difference wiring things all happening at the same time. [00:18:36] Speaker A: Yes. And I think so when it comes to, like, the personality differences, those are going to be things that are going to be what I would call conflict that you have to learn to manage. So an example of that would just be the simple difference between, like, an extrovert and an introvert. An extrovert is kind of want to have people over all the time and kind of have an open house kind of policy. An introvert literally is not designed like that. That would create a lot of stress and anxiety for them. So recognizing that and saying, okay, I cannot make my spouse like me, and recognizing, honoring that, if that's good, that's what is going to ultimately bring more glory to God, is that there's like this healthy idea there that we're different and we're unique and we're not trying to change our spouse to be like us. So in that. So there's that sense of like, we're just. Our personalities are different. They're still going to be conflict in that because we can't change each other. So we have to learn how to manage that conflict. Then when James 4 is talking about which is different is why do the Fights and quarrels start among you. It's because you have. You have these desires in you. And this is what couples do. If we're honest. We try to get that. We try to get our spouse. We demand them to change. We manipulate them. We insist that they see things our way. And that's simple. That is what. And so what I love about James 4, though, where it says you don't have because you don't ask God. Because what we're trying to do is we're trying to get those desires met through our spouse or trying to demand it from our speaker. But if one of us. It only takes one person. This is what I try to remind kids. Just one of you in that moment can say, hey, we obviously have very differing opinions about this. We both love God. Can we pray about this? Let's see what God wants. Can we submit to that? Then that changes everything. [00:20:27] Speaker C: That's a great point. [00:20:29] Speaker B: Absolutely. Just a quick plug for a. I think a book that. Two books. There's an author named Dave Harvey. He's got When Sinners say I Do was his first book. It's a very clear picture of the sin inside me. His conclusion is for marriage to flourish. I've got. Each person has to say with conviction, I am the biggest sinner in the marriage. So that's a great foundational book. His second book is called I Still do. And it's written for folks who are. And maybe 10 years into marriage or just. And there's other things. And he distinguishes between. Not everything is sin. Some things are brokenness and some things are just. That's the way they are. And you want them to change because. And you. What. What is it like to accept that and to grow together. [00:21:18] Speaker A: Right. [00:21:19] Speaker B: As a couple. [00:21:20] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:21:20] Speaker B: And. And the vision for. If we. If we were the same person as husband and wife wired the same way. Exactly. Which. No. Husband and wife, even if you test personality assessments do the same. Nobody's exactly the same. But if we can actually be uniquely who we are in a marriage, we're a better picture of Christ in the gospel to other people. Welcoming as a family versus us. Me trying to make my wife just like me or husband just like me. [00:21:48] Speaker A: God's design. That's God's. That is God's design. And so when we can have unity with those differences, how much more glory does God get? [00:21:57] Speaker B: Maybe a couple final points here. But you talked about conflict management versus being eliminated. So we talk about how a lot of times in our counseling that conflict can be good. That's probably a Foreign concept to people, but kind of as you process that, what do you mean by that? [00:22:15] Speaker A: So one, yeah, because when I tell people that, they, they always think, wow, I never thought about that. Conflict is the best opportunity to really know somebody. So let's say, you know, let's say you're having an argument with your spouse and it's not a sin issue. You just strongly both believe something to be the right way to go. Maybe it's the way you're educating your children, or should you take this job or move or whatever it is. It's not like that's a sinful thing to choose one or the other. But you have these deep, deep values and beliefs that you're kind of fighting sometimes at a very superficial level. But if you could recognize, like, wow, my spouse is really convicted about this. I wonder what that is. And we start asking each other the questions, like, why is this so important to you? What does it mean to you that we do this with our children? What would it mean to you if we moved and lived here by your family? And you start asking those questions. It gives us a greater understanding of our spouse. And so what I notice with people, and this is just fascinating, but what I notice is that sometimes when they get to the place where they understand, one of them just willingly submits to the other and they say, oh, I didn't realize that. Let's just do this because I get it. Like, there's this deeper meaning when we fail to look a little deeper. We're just always fighting superficially. So that can mean. About conflict, can be very good because it just highlights, hey, I really strongly believe about something. [00:23:46] Speaker C: Could you talk just a little bit more about. And this could be for any of us, I guess, but the idea of conflict, the way you're talking about conflict may not be the picture that a lot of people have when they think of that word conflict. For some of us, it might kind of evoke images of like, fighting, yelling, screaming, and that they think that that's what conflict looks like. And so if that's the picture they have, there might be a tendency to feel like I have freedom to fight that way. Or they might run the other direction and think, well, I'm just not going to address this because I don't want to have that kind of conflict. So how do we have healthy conflict without engaging sinfully or without running away from the problems? Because an absence of fighting doesn't necessarily mean that there is no conflict. [00:24:37] Speaker A: Right? Because there's always conflict. Right. And there's always Conflict, for all the reasons we just discussed, we're uniquely different. We're made differently. The fact that we're a man and a woman makes us very different. There's going to be conflict around that. So conflict is inevitable. [00:24:52] Speaker C: What? [00:24:53] Speaker A: It's not so conflict is a difference that we have in the way we view things, the way we think about things, the things that we value. Fighting is when we're hurting each other and we're demanding to be heard or to get our needs met. So conflict in itself. Yeah, I'm glad that you brought that up, Kathy, because a lot of people avoid it because they think that if we disagree, we're going to be sinfully going into this place where we're yelling. That's what a lot of people think about that. So there's a difference between fighting and conflict. So one of the things that we really want to try to work on in all of our marriages is how do we manage conflict? That's the word that I always use. How do we dialogue around it? And really interesting. I think that's helpful for couples to know, and I think it's encouraging. Some people think it's discouraging. You tell me what you guys. Okay. But apparently, when you. When. So the Gottmans, going back to the Gottmans, they've studied over 3,000 couples. They have done the longest longitudinal studies. They've studied couples for 20 years and traced them. And they have found that, on average, 31% of the conflict between a couple is solvable. 69% is not solvable. They're based on gridlocked issues, issues with, you know, outside things like in laws, personality differences, male, female differences. That's significant. But what's helpful, I think, about that is that when you feel like my husband and I have all this conflict, or my wife and I have all this conflict, I must have married the wrong person. Well, guess what? You did it. So I think that's encouraging. [00:26:24] Speaker B: Encouraging, yeah. [00:26:26] Speaker A: So what we need to do then is realize, okay, that 31%, that's solvable. How do we work together to solve that? The other ones that aren't solvable, which are called, like, perpetual conflicts, how do we manage them in ways where we're honoring each other and we're honoring each other's differences. We're not tearing each other down, and we're managing that in our life in ways that are, you know, not to try to solve it because it can't be solved, but we. But we can lovingly manage that. [00:26:56] Speaker C: I love how you kind of tied that up together. Because I think one of the things when we find ourselves in conflict is that we very quickly lose sight of God and his presence in our marriage. And so I love that language that you used of how do I honor my spouse in the midst of conflict, in the midst of disagreement? And it's a good reminder for me and for anybody who's listening that we are not alone in this, but we have a God who is over us, who's working in our conflicts and working in us in our marriage. So I think that's a really valuable. [00:27:33] Speaker A: Yeah. I will tell you, and it's interesting, too, that 80% of the time, women are more likely to bring up issues in the marriage when there's an area of conflict. [00:27:43] Speaker B: 80%. [00:27:43] Speaker A: 80% of the time, the women. Women are more likely. And so. And I've. I just think I see that that's true in men. A lot of. What a lot of men tell me is I just don't want to go there, but I just don't want to make it a big deal. I just. I'm going to deal with it. So then if the wife one day says, hey, honey, you forgot to bring the garbage up this morning. Could you. And then the husband says, last week you didn't do this. Like, you did do that. And then I'm like, well, how is that working? How are you letting that go? It sounds like you haven't quite let that go, and maybe you should have brought that up. It's healthier. And I wish that all men would do that more. But I think that. And I don't know why the gender difference is there. I don't think anybody knows why, but that'd be an interesting thing to study. But bringing up these things, it's critical. It's critical because they don't go away. If we don't bring up things and manage it, we start to develop this narrative. [00:28:37] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think tying it back to intimacy. What I'm hearing you say is conflict. Is it actually when it's shared, you're knowing, what does my spouse really value? So it's an avenue. It's kind of entryway to the values of my spouse's heart. Because if not, if there's never a disagreement or never. So the taking out of the trash. If the wife says that she might be. She loves a clean home because of X, Y and Z, why does she love that? Well, maybe that's how she grew up. Or maybe it gives her peace and rest. And. And so if the husband can actually talk about that and kind of engage or understand his wife's heart, then that might be a value that he shares as well. Just because she values it. And he might can work on it. He might not be perfect at it, but he can at least try because he loves his wife and wants her to have rest. So it's not about the trash. It's never about the trash. It's always about something deeper. [00:29:35] Speaker A: It's always about something deeper. It is always about something deeper. There's meanings behind everything. [00:29:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Real brief. We don't have a ton of time left, but when this conflict stuff, a lot of us. This has happened a lot for me in my marriage, we get emotionally overwhelmed because we're tired or, you know, there's all kinds of stuff. But we feel threatened. We feel like we want to justify. We get. We use this term, flooded. Talk about just the wisdom and not engaging in conflict in those moments. Or maybe just describe that a little bit briefly. [00:30:11] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah. So that. This is another area. Right. I think this is fascinating readers. So what the Gottmans did is. And I don't know if they did this or if they. We're talking about someone else's research in this area is they would videotape people and say, we want you to discuss an area of conflict. And so they would start the videotape, and so the couple would get into it, and then they would have them hooked up to, like. So they were measuring their heart rates, and they were measuring, like, different parts of their body. When their heart rates got to a point where they were going into dpa, which is diffuse physiological arousal. That's that fight or flight that we get into. What would happen is that the couple would look at each other, they would start speaking louder. They would start repeating themselves. Their ability to think clearly went down. Their ability to use humor went down. So then what they would say, because they were doing research and say. Say, oh, wait, excuse me. Our video equipment just malfunctioned. We're going to take a break here. Because they noticed that one of them was flooded. So they would take a break, and they still had their little measurements on their fingers, testing their pulse, testing their heart rate. They would wait for those people to regulate emotionally because they'd give them magazines to read. Then they'd go, okay, now the equipment's back up and running. Let's continue our conflict. Those couples all of a sudden had the ability to start to be rational again and to use humor and to connect. So we know physically the way God designed us when we feel Attacked. Like if a bear came into this room right now and I felt attacked, I would not have the ability to reason well and I would not be able to use a sense of humor. I wouldn't be like, oh, Caleb and Kathy, there's a bear. I would go into the mode that go designed me to go into when I feel unsafe. And so when we're in a fight with our spouse, we don't recognize this, but sometimes we just feel unsafe. Something is threatened, not necessarily physical safety, but maybe emotional safety, maybe. So when we go into that phase and we are already there, we cannot work things out rationally. We have to put a pause. And so the rules that we would say about that is you have to get away for at least an hour. And most importantly, when you break, you have to watch your bot light, you have to pray and say Lord, because otherwise if you don't do this, you're going to sit there and you're going to get worse, you're going to ruminate. And so you want to do that. And you also want to have a time to come back before you break from that. So you want to tell your spouse, hey, I need a break. Let's take an hour. And then you need to practice that, man. [00:32:44] Speaker B: We could do a whole podcasts on tools for that and how to do that. That's. But that's really helpful information to know and that and that every, like every human being, like God designed us to react to danger in a certain way and that's what we're feeling in those moments. And so that takes over. I've done it a lot. I'm not saying what. And that's when we, we say, we say things we regret in those moments and we, you know, that's where we want to have that exit plan. So that's, that's a whole other podcast. But as we're finishing up here, what would you say is, is there a helpful resource or even just what would you guys say to when somebody should maybe pursue counseling? Pursue marriage counseling? Are there some indicators you look for thoughts on that? Yeah. [00:33:38] Speaker A: So I will say that couples, when they looked at the research, most couples, when marital problems first start, they wait an average of six years before seeking counseling for marriage counseling. So I would say if you've got issues, even if they're not that big of a deal, just go to counseling. You might need to go for three sessions. That is worth it. Rather than waiting six years till things get really bad. [00:34:01] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. [00:34:02] Speaker A: That's interesting that that six year mark is with because then they almost get to a point, as you guys probably see, where people come in and they just feel like, I don't know if this is going to work because it's gotten so bad. So I would say, you know, if you are, if you're having, if you notice that you're drifting away from each other, that's more important. If you're fighting, that's probably better than drifting away. If you are not connecting and you feel like you're lonely and you don't know your spouse, you really need to get to counseling. [00:34:31] Speaker C: That's a wing. [00:34:32] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:34:33] Speaker B: And we'd love to be a resource for you there and can connect you with other resources as well. [00:34:39] Speaker A: There is a 30 day devotional. If anybody's just struggling with conflict, we have in our office, that's the one by, I think it's Steve Hoppe. Isn't that on marriage Conflict and it's called Talking as Teammates. That is a very helpful one, especially if the couple each does that together for 30 days because it is going to probably go through a lot of practical things they can do to learn to talk as a teen. [00:35:00] Speaker C: Yeah. And another one that I really like is called Build a Stronger Marriage by Bob Lepine. And it's a short one and it has very, it's broken down into really short chapters and has practical things that you can work on together as a couple. So if you're in a space where you're able to do that work together, that's also a really helpful resource. [00:35:20] Speaker B: Well, this was a lot. We covered a lot of good ground. There's plenty we could in the future. But thank you so much for joining us, Karen. I really appreciate what you do.